Printed Matters

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.
- Walter Lippman

Regular readers of this blog will need no reminder that journalism is important, and that the world needs journalists. After all, this blog, and others like it, is dedicated to the proposition that journalism needs saving. So we wring our hands, we huff and puff, and occasionally we offer what we think are sensible solutions to incremental problems. Because we care. And if you’re reading this, you probably care too.

The title of this post is the first premise in a big argument – an argument in the philosophical sense, which proceeds from certain premises and arrives forthwith at inevitable conclusions. This argument, I hope, will arrive at a conclusion with which all persons interested in journalism cannot help but agree. The question it answers – why does the world need better news aggregators? – is not an incremental question, but one of fundamental importance.

Each premise of the argument will be the title of a post in a series of ten posts. And each post will seek to elucidate and bolster the premise contained in its title. So let’s begin.

The quote above by Walter Lippman is as succinct as any statement about the importance of journalism. Journalism exists, and is important, because it brings to citizens the information and context needed to be free, to make rational choices, to hold government and authority accountable, to unmask corruption, to flush out wrongdoing. Journalism exists to tell us things that some people don’t want us to know.

And there’s more than just liberty, justice and peace at stake. Otherwise, we couldn’t explain the value of sports and celebrity news, for example. News also fulfills a social role for us. It satisfies our Awareness Instinct, as Kovach and Rosenstiel put it.

Some might say that the role of journalism has been lessened in this age of ubiquitous, free-flowing information. Citizens and professional journalists alike post their news on the Internet for free – free to any citizen who wants to read it, free for aggregators and search engines to collect and redistribute; free for any citizen to appropriate for comment, amplification, or correction.

In a world where anyone can post, use and re-use the news, what is the role of the professional?

Professional journalists are more important than ever in a world of oversupply. We need credible people, people we can trust, to sort the wheat from the chaff, to make sense of the barrage, to order things. Because in abundance of information, there is a shortage of attention. To what should we pay attention? We need people who can sort that out, retell the story in an engaging way, and most of all, people we can trust to do it consistently and correctly.

Or as the now-famous cyber-journalist Adrian Holovaty put in a recent Chicago Tribune article, “We’re creating an ordered view of chaos. That’s what journalists do, right?”

The role of professional journalists and editors is more important than ever. Note that I am NOT saying that these professionals must be employed at big news orgs. There’s a good discussion of this over at Eat Sleep Publish.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series, and the next premise in the argument, titled “Journalism is hard and needs to be funded.”