By Anthony Furci | @AnthonyRFurci
I feel the most important values for journalists today are fairness, integrity, and perseverance. Fairness is the most obvious for me, as this and balance go hand in hand. To be a successful journalist, you must present (or at the very least, try to present) as many sides of an issue as possible. For example, you can’t write about a law change without speaking to lawmakers, the general public/people directly affected (if it relates to a certain group), people in jail because of this now-changed law, etc. I’m not exactly sure how fairness would be useful in approaching the new and evolving digital technologies we have to produce stories, but I guess we’d need to be fair to the tech? Push its limits but don’t exceed, for instance. We’d also need to be fair to readers – stories presented in new ways must be easily accessible. If someone can’t figure out how to get information out of your elaborate multimedia presentation, then what’s the point? Clarity feeds into fairness too in this sense.
This also feeds into integrity, which relates to honesty. No good journalist should be lying to the public (‘fake news’, anyone?). No one really trusts journalists anymore – we’re not held in the same esteem as we have been held in the past. Integrity is important, as we need to hold ourselves (not just politicians) to account, too. I feel it has a similar relation to new storytelling tools as the above point on fairness, as we need to be honest to ourselves in sticking with our abilities. It’s fine to learn how to shoot 360 video and eventually put a story together through that medium, but if you’ve got a same-day deadline and you’ve never used a 360 camera before, it’s probably not a good idea to shoot with one.
Perseverance is a no-brainer. If you don’t have the perseverance to seek out and stick with a story, you may as well leave the profession. It’s something I’ve experienced in my year-and-a-half studying journalism so far, simply through plenty of knockbacks from potential talent. It’s also important for actually putting the story together, once you’ve got all the necessary information, through proofreading, editing, redrafting, and so on. This certainly relates to new technologies for storytelling, as we’ll need to work hard to actually figure out how they can be used (and used effectively). Certain technologies will work better for certain stories, and it’ll take a lot of trial and error for that perseverance to shine through. It’s necessary though, as without it, the story will be completely unsatisfying – both to put together, and to read.
