Why We Still Need Journalists

In our era of public news feeds and random people taking video on the street and posting it on social media to be shared a million times, some people have wondered, “Why do we need journalists?” As someone who has spent time building this platform and who has spent some time as a journalist this is a pressing question. If everyone is a journalist, I should shut this site down and convert it to a pagoda to my books, right? Seeing as I have no intentions of closing any time soon, I’ll tell you why I will be with you for many years to come: context.

The 4th Estate

Why are talk shows so popular? Why do people still read everything from TMZ and the National Enquirer to the New York Times? It’s simple: people want context. If there are 50 videos online of various news events are you going to take the time to watch each one and draw your own conclusions? Do you even care to? Most people won’t bother put that much effort into a Buzzfeed quiz much less the news. Fortunately, modern civilization has blessed us with a class of people whose job it is to provide information and context for what is going on around us: the journalist. From the Civil War, the first conflict published in newspapers with lithograph images, to Vietnam and more present conflicts; journalists have put themselves in harm’s way in order to report the news and let the public know what is happening, why it’s happening and how it may affect us. These are the tireless people who sit at state houses and in Congress watching for legislation that affects us. That is one the reasons a critical press is crucial to functioning democracy. Journalists give us a chance to find out information with context and most importantly help us understand how it affects us in our every day lives. News with no context is just raw information.

I’m not the first to make the argument about context. Anyone who has worked with or studied journalism brings up that point. However, while the general public may be very good at collecting the raw data and crowdsourcing the raw information journalists also help us in the realms of observation and also taking footage and gathering information where communication networks may be very weak or non-existent. Journalists also excel and being able to spend the time to follow a story, find new angles, investigate comparisons and draw conclusions from evidence. Your everyday smartphone user isn’t going to go to all that trouble. People have lives and for a select few who are brave enough, their lives are spent observing and being the eyes and ears of the world.

The Need to Tell a Story

Journalists are the storytellers of our time. When people need to tell their story or highlight an injustice, it is journalists who are able to help them tell their story in a way that does justice and often helps them retain their humanity when they have been vilified in the public opinion.  Without journalists that function would disappear to the world of shaky (albeit high quality) smartphone videos. When newspapers first democratized the news and the written word, people relied the journalists in the papers to tell the story of what happened and how it might affect them. Society still needs this function, the economic behind it are what is in question and that happens in any business.

Journalism is taking a new turn. In the past, newspapers had the platforms and handled the business. Journalism of the future is going to be more broad-based than before and more coalesced around particularly people who may or may not have a platform of their own but can still share their unique perspective. The media outlets of the future will be content aggregators, just as they always were, but rather than aggregating in-house content that they produce, they will aggregate blogs and videos around topic areas and most importantly, bring it all together in some context. The loss in journalism isn’t the act of storytelling but the loss of control around where they storytelling takes place. Journalism is no more a casualty of new media than music or movies; it is merely changing the way people consume those stories and why.

The Bottom Line

While the definition may be changing and the nature of the profession, such as it is, may be changing but the need for journalists and their ability to give us context and tell a story is needed more than ever in a world of crowded media. Who rises up to perform that function is rapidly changing and I think that is a very good thing.