At National Conference for Media Reform – Boston 2011
Panel: Wikileaks, Journalism and Modern-Day Muckraking
Emily Bell: how do we equip future generations of journalists. The role of professional journalists has been replaced by people and algorithms but journalists are not obsolete. Wikileaks caught journalists by surprise: to my students I asked what would you do if this fell on your desk? Answer should be we should just publish it. We need to be tech-literate and we don’t have free press. The ‘free press’ is owned by Twitter, FB and google and they are also debated. Ppl have poor understanding of how technology can be used so it means that we have to shift how journalism is done. We have to enable connection of expertise and how to maintain professionalism on a network that you do not necessarily own or have control over. We need to report on what the impact of such stories are and we have not yet seen how all this plays out in terms of free press. We therefore need to encourage journalists to close the feedback loop with follow-up reporting on how their stories affect change.