Nathalie Malinarich’s prediction ‘Making It Easy’ makes an interesting point about the importance of adapting in a competitive and ever changing world.
While a number of this year’s predictions had a focus on the news media becoming more ‘user friendly’, Malinarich’s particular focus on the phone screen as a home base for news shows a noticeable understanding of just how people seek out and engage with information.
People rely on their phones for just about everything. That’s not a shocking fact. The part of Marlinarich’s prediction that stuck with me, however, was her insistence that adapting to keep up with technology isn’t about “dumbing down” the news.
Journalism should not be about proving how smart you are. If people can’t find, understand and engage with your story, then nobody benefits. Plenty of very intelligent people will get frustrated and give up on seeking out news if they have to wade through too much unreliable, convoluted or pretentious content.
People will always want to know what’s happening in the world. Instead of giving in to the ‘people are slaves to technology and don’t care what’s happening in the world outside their phones’ assumption, journalists should instead be finding ways of making those phones an effective connection between the public and their news.
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Swati Sharma’s ‘Failing Diversity is Failing Journalism’ seems to get at the heart of what many journalists would agree is our most important duty. If journalism is about telling the truth, and the truth is about being fair and unbiased, then diversity in a news room should not be as rare as we see it being today.
Any story a journalist produces should be an unbiased picture of the world we live in, and look at a story from more than one side. If one kind of person is telling one kind of story, over and over, then it’s impossible to paint that picture.
Sharma sees a lack of diversity in newsrooms as stemming largely from a fear of unpredictability. But people who are different, who have had different upbringings, cultural backgrounds or life experiences, can bring things to a team or story that may never have occurred to other journalists.
Not only can a diverse journalistic staff lead to innovative ways of discovering and approaching news, but it can bring a variety of voices and viewpoints to people’s attentions.
It’s easy enough to predict what someone who is exactly like you will think about a particular issue. If those are the only voices an audience ever encounters, not only will they never feel a need to reconsider their views, but there’s very little point in them engaging with news media at all.
Image Courtesy of Nieman Lab.
