We live in a time when fake news proliferate. It is called the ‘post-truth age’.
In this TED talk, Lara Satrakian, a journalist dedicated to ‘building innovative news platforms that stand ready to engage and explain the complexity of our world’ suggests three way to fix the broken media industry. Here they are:
Idea number one: we need news that’s built on deep-domain knowledge. Given the waves and waves of layoffs at newsrooms across the country, we’ve lost the art of specialization. Beat reporting is an endangered thing. When it comes to foreign news, the way we can fix that is by working with more local journalists, treating them like our partners and collaborators, not just fixers who fetch us phone numbers and sound bites.
Idea number two: we need a kind of Hippocratic oath for the news industry, a pledge to first do no harm. Journalists need to be tough. We need to speak truth to power, but we also need to be responsible. We need to live up to our own ideals, and we need to recognize when what we’re doing could potentially harm society, where we lose track of journalism as a public service.
The third idea. We need to embrace complexity if we want to make sense of a complex world. Embrace complexity — not treat the world simplistically, because simple isn’t accurate. We live in a complex world. News is adult education. It’s our job as journalists to get elbow deep in complexity and to find new ways to make it easier for everyone else to understand. If we don’t do that, if we pretend there are just simple answers, we’re leading everyone off a steep cliff. Understanding complexity is the only way to know the real threats that are around the corner. It’s our responsibility to translate those threats and to help you understand what’s real, so you can be prepared and know what it takes to be ready for what comes next.
Read HERE the transcript of this TED talk.
Persona 