Twitter. iPad. Social media. WikiLeaks.
A mere decade ago, these words and ideas did not exist. They were little more than vague notions in a few media minds. Now, they dominate conversation, both defining the craft’s present and predicting its future.
It’s precisely this task the Global Editors Network faced while hosting on their inaugural News World Summit 2011 in the booming metropolis of Hong Kong. In the midst of a constantly changing journalistic terrain, how should these professionals prepare to react?
With more than 25 presentations and 50 speakers over a span of three days, the Summit gathered well-respected and well-versed journalistic visionaries from all corners of the globe. Topics of conversation and contention flowed from upcoming technologies to an enduring journalistic ethic to how to integrate burgeoning social medias into modern-day storytelling.
“This conference is about journalism,” said GEN President Xavier Vidal-Folch. “It exists to produce one winner: our citizens.”
It was this note that reverberated throughout the entire conference. The goal for everyone in attendance was not, at least primarily, to improve technology or invent methodology. Instead, it was much simpler: to produce better journalism.
“Good journalists are good storytellers,” said German television journalist Robert Amlung. “Even in the crowded world of the Internet—it’s still about stories.”
This sentiment resounded from the stage, again—
“Our goal is not to be the biggest, but to do the best journalism,” said Wolfgang Blau, a German editor-in-chief. “If we can let go of that goal, we will be much more likely to succeed.”
And again—
“The big question is whether or not we’re going to ask people to create their own stories, to embrace them so they can be a part of the dialog we’re having today,” said Ivo Burum, an Australian media CEO.
And again.
“The field in front of (today’s journalism students) is wide open,” said Dan Gillmor, an American journalism professor. “They can invent the future; they must invent the future.”
GEN’s inaugural Summit emphatically and repeatedly reminded these professionals with a propensity to panic that journalism—in its most fundamental and foundational sense—remains unchanged.
So in one sense, yes, absolutely and unequivocally, journalism has changed.
But also, in another sense, it hasn’t changed at all.
It’s still about one thing and one thing only: telling stories, and telling them well.