Can journalism be rescued?
Back in February I wrote a thread about it, which I'll revisit and extend here:
Back in February I wrote a thread about it, which I'll revisit and extend here:
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1361041398351286272
Another, more recent thread of thoughts, mostly focusing on honorable use of language:
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1406950418748379139?t=jT6sDrYvCl4ks7WF6v6Oxw&s=19
More recently, I've come to understand that the dream of an objective truth teller is just that: A dream. Counterintuitively, the epistemology of journalism must embrace humility and wear its bias on its sleeve if it wants to regain some trust.
https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1419712533594710027?t=jT6sDrYvCl4ks7WF6v6Oxw&s=19
With that in mind, I believe that feedback loops are essential to quality in a time of information warfare. Publications should allow for granular commenting, and have a formal, transparent, and as independent as possible process ensuring correction of factual errors.
Factual errors of course are not the only kind of sleight of hand as we know full well. As more failure modes are identified and countermeasures operationalized, they should be added to the same loop.
Even with the obvious failure modes removed though, I think there's a deeper, broader failure mode in the journalism content loop. The very fact that its mission is to provide content. Instead the kind of service I dream of is responsible for keeping you informed.
This means that on some days it may have a lot of content for you, while on others it may have nothing, and that should be OK. Journalists should be encouraged to go deep instead of chasing deadlines and clicks.
An article's success (assuming articles are the unit it produces) should be judged by how much closer to reality are the readers after reading it. How do you think our modern corporate media and journalists would fare by this metric?
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