The audience at the annual Hugh Cudlipp memorial lecture has a wide age gap. At one end are grizzled veterans of old Fleet Street well into their 80s. At the other are scores of 20-something wannabe journalists.
So I expected that they would have very different reactions to Monday evening’s lecture by Emily Bell, the founding director of Columbia University’s Tow centre for digital journalism.
Wrong. Well, nearly wrong. The general consensus among both the young and the old was one of admiration for Bell’s deft comparison of the popular journalism of the 1950s with the new journalism of the digital age.
“Hugely interesting wasn’t it”, enthused one former Daily Mirror editor of early 1970s vintage. “That really set me thinking”, said a third-year student from the London College of Communication, which staged the event.
But there was also a subtle distinction in the responses because pensioned-off editors can watch from afar. The students may be so-called digital natives but they must make their way in what is an uncertain world.
Several students I spoke to, overwhelmingly eager to work for traditional media owners, registered their concern about how they will fare in an environment where “big media”, as Bell pointed out, is getting smaller and social media is in the ascendant.
They were reflecting on Bell’s statement:
The ‘social media team’ is no longer the group of people bullying you to tweet your story, but now key to the operation of how and what you report.
The practice of good social media use, finding verifying and disseminating stories, are core to reporting, not simply a wrapper for ‘proper journalism’.
In her broad survey of the changes wrought by the digital revolution, the stand-out feature was her explanation of the relationship between social media and traditional media outlets.
After running through the eye-watering visitor/user figures achieved by Silicon Valley’s platforms – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, not to mention Google – Bell spoke of the essential distinction between their operators and journalists. She then made two key observations. Firstly:
Engineers are not trained to think about moral consequences, they are educated to produce efficient systems, which they earnestly and often rightly believe will improve society.
Similarly most journalists do not know nearly enough about technology to understand that how you design software, what you include in algorithms, are essentially editorial decisions.
Secondly, reflecting further on “the intersection of technology and journalism”, she said:
Never before in the history of journalism has the power and reach of a small number of players had such a decisive effect on a market, and never before have we known so little about its operation.
Her recipe? A rapprochement, what she called “an open and collaborative dialogue” between the purveyors of journalism and the social media companies, “the new masters of the information universe”.
We need each other, she said. I found myself nodding vigorously at that. We, the losing side in this struggle for audience attention, recognise our value. What remains uncertain is whether Them, the social media panjandrums, realise the importance of the vital contribution made by Us.
Bell appeared to be optimistic. In company with some of the audience at the reception afterwards, I was altogether less sure.
