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- Finding “Success” in digital news - September 4, 2024
We’re nearing the end of another semester at the University of the Philippines where we teach journalism. This semester one of the subjects we handled was Online Journalism.
When we first conceptualized this subject in 2018 the idea was to give students an edge by teaching them about opportunities for journalism in the digital platform. Well, this was as opposed to other journalism courses that were geared towards hard copy reportage. But the pandemic and the very fast pace in technological advancements soon overtook us. In short, almost every media outlet is now online, doing online journalism. So how else and what else would we in the academe teach in this elective course?
This sem, we decided to launch a digital laboratory publication which will be managed by students enrolled in the Online Journalism course. Well, why not? It is high time that we take advantage of the digital platforms like so many other digital newspapers have been doing. Like what the Cordillera News Agency (CNA) is doing, like what North Luzon Monitor, Mountain Beacon, Nordis, Baguio Chronicle, and the growing number of local papers have been doing.
Journalism as a profession has changed a lot in the past few years. According to Nora Quebral, the mother of Development Communication, information and communication technology has become pocket-sized, portable, personal, and affordable. It has changed the nature of mediated communication, eaten into the traditional preserves of mainstream media, and virtually segmented its users by age and income. It has made direct participation in governance possible, for one thing, exemplified by the relatively peaceful political revolutions since the last century.
There has been a blurring of the line between producers and audiences and this has generated new forms of audience participation, maturation of more established forms of participation, including user-generated content, social media and citizen journalism.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, a researcher in 2016, described aptly how embedded social media is in the journalism profession: “Social media are now well-established tools facilitating audience participation and journalistic practice. The widely documented normalization of Twitter has taken place alongside the cementation of Facebook and YouTube, and the growing importance of Instagram. These platforms allow audience members to share news and information and participate meaningfully in local and global debates. Such participation may range from that of “accidental journalists” providing user-generated content, to the social sharing practices that shape engagement with news events small and large. Research… shows that journalists increasingly draw on these same social media platforms for crowdsourcing, to find vox pops, and to enhance their professional profiles and virtual identities.”
Hence, the skills we need now are more technologically dependent. One has to be tech-savvy while still retaining two things: 1. the journalistic skills of communication, data gathering, vetting, writing, and editing. And, 2 the ethics and values that make journalists distinct from other content creators.
We need journalists who have embraced digital news as the new norm and made use of opportunities to upskill themselves to conform to the needs of online publication platforms. Journalists who have enhanced their presence in the digital sphere, particularly in social media, while maintaining their credibility as sources of news and information to combat the disinfodemic. Journalists who have learned to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset, applying for story grants and other publication opportunities in order to gain a livable income. Journalists who have become more resilient, weathering not just health challenges but also red tagging, harassment, cyber libel, and attacks on their lives. Journalists who have developed a
heightened attitude of care and concern for their colleagues and peers who are in the same boat. All of this while maintaining their passion and commitment to journalism.