News Media Innovation Reconsidered

Ethics and Values in a Creative Reconstruction of Journalism

Maria Luengo, Susana Herrera-Damas, Maria Luengo, Susana Herrera-Damas

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781119706496
• eBook ISBN: 9781119706502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A guide to journalistic ethics for today's digital technologies

With contributions from an international panel of experts on the topic, News Media Innovation Reconsidered offers a guide for the revitalizing of the ethical and civil ideals of journalism. The authors discuss how to energize journalistic practices and products and explore how to harness the power of digital technological innovations such as immersive journalism, the automatization and personalization of news, newsgames, and artificial-intelligence news production.

The book presents an innovative framework of "creative reconstruction" and reviews new journalistic concepts, models, initiatives, and practices that clearly demonstrate professional ethics that embrace truth seeking, transparency, fact checking, and accuracy, and other ethical considerations. While the contributors represent numerous countries, many of examples are drawn from the Spanish-speaking media and can serve as models for an international audience. This important book:

• Explores the impact on the news media from mobile-first, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence-driven platforms
• Examines the challenges of maintaining journalistic ethics in today's digital world
• Demonstrates how to use technology to expose readers to news outside their comfort zones
• Provides information for discerning truth from fake news

Written for researchers, studentsin journalism and communication programs, New Media Innovation Reconsidered offers a much-needed guide for recreating journalistic ethics in our digital age.

Journalistic Innovation at the Service of the Public

10
Journalism, Algorithms, and the People’s Right to Know

Michaëla Cancela-Kieffer

Agence France-Presse

Introduction¹

Read these words aloud: gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte. Now try to guess what they really mean without referring to your old Maths and/or Greek etymology lessons: how many zeros? Numbers get harder and harder to comprehend. And, as journalists like myself might fail to correctly answer those questions, so might the readers.

However, understanding data has never been more important. In 2019, the word “love” was posted online 23,211 times every minute, 188 million emails were sent, and almost 10,000 users took a Uber ride—every minute (source: Domo, Data Never Sleeps).

Every move we make generates bytes of data for private companies and governments. And as the datafication of our society becomes a reality, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) will help those who own that information to analyze and predict needs, behaviors, and changes—while revolutionizing every aspect of our lives—from healthcare and manufacturing, to journalism and transportation. Algorithms will make decisions based on all that data.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the saddest proof of the importance of data. Decisions are made based on information about the spread of the virus and countries that have poor local data are at most risk. On the other side of the coin, concerns over civil liberties arise when governments consider collecting data about every move we make to enforce social distancing.

This disruption is happening as journalism has to adapt to an era of information warfare that presents, as Emily Bell writes, “both a personal and existential threat” for the media.

Basically, there has never been so much information available, but it has never been more abstract, fragile, and elusive.

Last but not least, an increasing number of people do not get their news from “traditional media;” 55% of Americans get it on social media “often or sometimes,” according to the Pew Research Center (2019).

Not only are we losing ground due to a lack of training when it comes to accessing, understanding, and explaining crucial information that might shape our societies—such as that generated by data and algorithms—but we are also unable to reach the recipients.

So, where does journalism stand? Is there still a role for the Fourth Estate and how can it be maintained? Are journalists still able to help the public understand the environment we inhabit?

This chapter advocates for an approach to journalism that would embrace The Disruption with the ultimate purpose of defending its core mission, safeguarding “the people’s right to know.”

As society becomes increasingly more complex, new intellectual and practical data-driven tools are needed for journalism to thrive. The time might also have come to concentrate on what really matters. For instance, do we still need to dedicate countless resources to the soundbits of politicians that can easily be found in their social media accounts? It is also time for creativity and radical collaborative journalism involving other disciplines—the obvious ones being mathematics and coding.

A Look at the Founding Fathers

Some 2500 years ago, Greek citizens started debating about almost everything, including the very existence of their gods. Protagoras, a famous philosopher, had wondered if those gods were not the product of our imagination, while sophist intellectuals would tour this wealthy part of the world questioning every belief (Mossé, 1971). The rich city-state of Athens was directly ruled by its citizens, who would decide on matters as important as going to war. But philosophers such as Plato had doubts about the efficiency of direct democracy.

Thucydides, author of The History of the Peloponnesian War, also had his reservations. The aristocrat who would later be considered the greatest of Greek historians was very critical of the Athenian political culture. As Josiah Ober writes, “what the demos collectively opined was given, through the act of voting, the status of fact.” But “Athenian political culture was based on collective opinion rather than on certain knowledge and on the assumption that opinion could be translated into practical reality through democratic political process” (Ober, 1993).

Information and opinion would be delivered by public speakers—in fact all citizens were trained for that—and speakers were involved in a contest for public attention: “They could not afford to make the issue seem too difficult for an audience to comprehend within the chronological constraints imposed by an oral presentation (…) They were interested parties, and thus looked at the world from a predetermined perspective” (Ober, 1993).

How would the citizens then be able to make informed choices? This is the context in which Thucydides designed a method to describe reality, separating facts from opinion. The ultimate goal of his book was to give a thorough account to citizens of what happened during the war so that they could, in the future, make informed choices. In his writings he clearly tells the reader what the checked facts are and what can be considered a personal opinion.

These were his words:

And with regard to my factual reporting of events of the war, I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not … to be guided by my own general impressions: either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I have heard of them from eyewitnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible [emphasis added] (o.v. 411 BCE).

(Thucydides, 1972, p. 48)

That method would later be called “History.” More recently, Australian author Keith Windschuttle (1999) argued that Thucydides created the method that defines “journalism” long before it existed. In his book Journalism, Ethics and Society, David Berry (2016, p. 40) agrees: “It’s fair to credit him (Thucydides) with a spirit of journalism, to produce information that would serve a civic debate [emphasis added].”

Edmund Burke’s notion of the Fourth Estate also clearly establishes what journalists’ role should be in society. And also does nineteenth-century writer Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution (Berry, 2016).

The “spirit” of journalism is much older than the word itself. It is “the attempt to be culturally objective and self-critical, rather than subjective and self-defensive” (Windschuttle, 1999).

This attempt to be “culturally objective and self-critical” has been a pillar of democracy from its very beginning, long before the birth of the Fourth Estate and republican forms of governance.

“Without democracy, there can be no journalism. When democracy falters, journalism falters, and when journalism goes awry, democracy goes awry” writes James Carey (2007, p. 13).

Looking back at Greece’s Athenian democracy could be inspiring today. Never has the agora been so vast; it is formed by billions connected to the Internet. The twenty-first century’s public speakers are also, and more than ever, involved in a contest for “people’s attention.” Also, as the oldest forms of journalism are disrupted, going back to the essence of journalism could be of great help.

James Carey recalls in his essay that “journalism” comes from the French word “jour,” “day” in French, and refers to the practice of recording daily events. Once a private practice, it became a way of recording events for entire communities. It transferred “a private habit onto the community: the keeping of a collective record of the facts and events” (Carey, 2007, p. 8).

But is it not also that “the Fourth Estate, armed to the teeth with a new confronting rationality, distributes information into the public domain enabling and empowering the public to produce new forms of critical thought” (Berry, 2016, p. 67).

What has all of this to do with data journalism, computational journalism, and algorithms? It seemed important, in an era of doubt and disruption, and as many new ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Journalism’s Creative Reconstruction: How Innovation in News Is Embracing Enduring Professional and Civil Values
• Journalism, Ethics, and Innovation in Times of Digital Turbulence
• News Ethics and Emerging Journalistic Narratives
• Interrogating Data, Algorithms, and Automatization Through Journalism Ethics
• Journalistic Innovation at the Service of the Public
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement