The future of quality journalism

The future of journalism is assured but it is an online Babel with a nearly indistinguishable continua from paid to unpaid; from objective to propagandistic; from balanced to fanatical; from truth to lies. We will not be losing quality journalism. Already, publically funded organizations like Wikipedia are attempting to provide facts on which to judge many “stories”, and a blogosphere provides us with unlimited editorial. What we have substantially lost already is quality editors. Editors should be the gatekeepers that shape and select the news that will be given the credibility of being printed below a masthead. Over past decades in Australian newspapers, we have seen these editors replaced again and again in a search for the most malleable, or the most likely to ensure a consistent “line” is followed. A captive culture had only 1,2 or 3 papers to choose from, and so they survived, not because they were great, but, like political parties, because they were the best of a bad lot, and whether you liked them or not, they defined discussion within the culture. Now the internet has opened the gates, and readers are voting with their clicks. The demise of newspapers is merely one aspect of the larger international trend towards cultural fragmentation. The internet is only one of many enabling forces that are amplifying this trend. Wikipedia is the most famous attempt to broker a new editorial internationalism – strictly limited to factual reporting. Perhaps, the ‘bad press”, it receives contains some jealousy that it may just be a model for the future of the press in Babel.

Stephen Digby