I read a short while ago that even the big American tabloids have considerable difficulty in keeping up with the competition from social networks.
The pressure of counterinformation popularthe disclosure of truth from the street that previously it was unthinkable they could go up to the news honors and free non-professional initiative make journalism one of the professions most in crisis in recent years.
It seems that digital citizenship has broken the barriers of the self-referential schemes of news– and this is a good thing – interrupting the 'authoritative' flow of communication, fragmenting everyday reality into a myriad of truths. Thus it becomes difficult to maintain a reliable and 'accredited' point of view.
Nothing more false, in my opinion.
Let's first start from a fact: what still holds up, from a journalistic point of view, is the reliability of some information networks such as the BBC, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and more at a national level: our Rai or, at the level of printed paper, la Repubblica and Corriere, but also Tgcom or Sky news, – to mention the most 'accredited' warheads and information networks – which also, as the first disseminators of news, seem increasingly polluted by the logic of economics and power.
Maybe someone will object to me that these networks and newspapers have actually always been polluted in this way.
In reality, things are not quite like that.
Criticism loses an important point of view: the historical context.
Just 30 years ago, today's reality looked like a science fiction scenario. And what might seem reprehensible to us today was once practice, system, balance. Therefore, with digitization something has already changed, in terms of transparency and democratization of social and civil processes. Of course we are not fully convinced but many steps forward have been made.
The current pollution of the conveyance of news is something much more superficial and visible than it once was. An important emergence.
The reliability of the authoritative news broadcasters today, however, appears once again under attack due to the renewed attempt to harness their professionalism and experience at the service of the new form of connection social.
Apart from the fact that one can be naturally inclined towards a profession, due to the environment in which one is born or one's own temperament, journalists are not born but made. It is the experience that makes the monk That's why in my opinion professions should not be abolished orders.
Television and large publishers remain the firm and experiential point of training and information for the public. But beyond this fixed point for me there is nothing but a collaborative society, today, increasingly interconnected, with which even the 'great experiences' should come to terms in order to battle side by side with civil society for ever greater transparency and affirmation of rights disseminated and to be disseminated. Digitization is the main pivot in this.
And considering that the economic crisis also prevents the large information networks and the most consolidated newspapers from being present everywhere, considering that globalization has widened the boundaries of news, it is clear that the ability to compete depends a lot on the ability to use the sources.
The point is, on the contrary, that journalism has finally taken a road that is schematically different from politics, which it has always accompanied. But we are still at the entrance to the junction.
This was discussed in the New Chamber of Parliamentary Groups in Via Campo di Marzio - Rome - last Wednesday 20 May 2015, at the conference “Italy changes. Is journalism changing?” organized by the Press Office of the Chamber of Deputies in collaboration with the Parliamentary Press Association and the Order of Journalists of Lazio.
The event was divided into four panels: "The challenge of the newspaper that changes with digital"; “Order of journalists, change or die”; “Italian publishers and journalists, how to get out of the crisis”; “Are we journalists going to be able to retire?”.
Mario Calabresi highlighted the point on the difference between the ancient way of doing television and printed journalism and the current one.
We are bombarded by information and in this, digitization has been a great bearer of the exponential increase in 'newsworthy' but it has also been exemplary for the democratization of processes. We are in the fifth power: 2.0
And as Marco Damilano underlined, today flexibility becomes the instrument of power 2.0. and the voice of this new power is the one that rises from the people to shout: 'the king is naked'. We are at the authenticity of reality. To its being 'social service'.
For example, Rai has been maintaining this wave for years, between shadows and lights. And it is starting to become more and more lights than shadows, because more and more 'public service' precisely, more and more TV for the public rather than an indefinite mass.
If journalism is able to take the digital revolution into account, it will be able to become an ever more authentic 'information service', it is supposed. A 'disintermediation' from political power but an 'intermediation' with the public.
Everyone will be their own brand said Marco Damilano, making life even more difficult for hidden persuaders by virtue of a bypassable space, for a power that no longer exists, it is useless to be nostalgic.
Credibility is an ancient journalistic rule, Marco Damilano asserted forcefully, with the characteristic of the immediacy and humility of information, because everything is a fragment, a frame, which is placed in a film and in which frame of the film is the reporter's job to decide.
In practice, the characteristic of professional journalism of the future will be the ability to reconstruct a context. Power will become increasingly irritating and standoffish, and only an idea communicated through a discreet and humanly respectful means will be worth (Aldo Moro)
Digital citizenship is no longer an app of the historic passage. Digital citizenship is part of neo-humanism which can no longer be subtended and what the revolutions of the past have failed to change could succeed in the 'digital revolution'
