This is what Javier Lascuráin, journalist with over 30 years of experience in EFE agency, thinks about the new trends in journalism.
Estela Nieto
Javier Lascuráin joined the national department in 2023, and is responsible for revising and creating the style guide. He shares his experience working at the agency and the various challenges faced in journalism today.
What does the agency mean to you?
It's like my home because, unfortunately or fortunately, I've been working at EFE for over 30 years. I started as an intern, and I've spent practically my entire professional life here. It's a project that I truly believe in. I think it's very important to have news agencies that facilitate the work of the media to reach the citizens. I also strongly believe that well-managed public media are important.
In recent years, the world has changed a lot, especially with the impact of social media and AI in our lives. Most jobs are undergoing significant transformations, including journalism. What are the most significant changes you've noticed?
In my years working here, one of the most profound changes is that the media have ceased to be the almost sole intermediary between sources and citizens. Until not long ago, perhaps 20 years ago, any source, be it a government or a municipality, needed the media to reach citizens with their message. The appearance of the new digital world disrupts this dynamic. The media have completely lost their monopoly on intermediation, and that affects how we work.
"Journalism has changed tremendously, reflecting how the world has changed. Everything changes." This change in journalism has led many media outlets or agencies to join the social media boom. Do you consider social media friends or enemies of journalism?
I would say on even days they seem like one thing, and on odd days they seem like another. On one hand, social media allows us to get much closer to our sources of information. But regarding citizens, it presents a real problem. How we use social media as media organizations is especially challenging for us at EFE. News agencies are essentially wholesalers of information, and we charge for news. If we use social media, we bypass a step and go directly to citizens, essentially competing with our own clients. Media outlets pay us for news. If we "give away" all our news through social media, we are cannibalizing ourselves. On the other hand, if we are not on social media in some way, even if it's just showing a part of what we have, we disappear from this world.
How do you cope with this?
There are many formulas. The formula EFE has chosen is to only provide a part of its information through its website and social media, serving as a showcase to say to the media and citizens,
"this is what we are capable of."
However, as seen, social media not only allows media and agencies to get closer to the audience but also allows the audience to create a lot of content, whether true or false. What can the media do in a society where anyone can write a "news" story?
I believe the future for some media outlets, particularly agencies like EFE, lies in trust. We live in a hyper-informed world where everyone has a channel to disseminate information. So, what is our role? Our principle is to gain the trust of those who use us, those who read us, to ensure that when someone receives information from EFE, they know it is true, verified news from reliable sources. There's a metaphor used a lot, I heard it first from Iñaki Gabilondo, who said that when there's a flood, the first thing that runs out is drinking water. This applies to the information world. There is a brutal overabundance of information, yet it is increasingly difficult to find trustworthy, confirmed, serious, and impartial information. That is our value. The opportunity for a medium, for our brand, to be associated with those values and to be reliable. There will always be a need for that kind of reliable information.
"when there's a flood, the first thing that runs out is drinking water and this applies to the information world."
This inundation of false, biased, or unreliable information has led many young people to lose interest in watching, reading, or listening to news. What can the media or agencies do?
I think the media, in general, do not necessarily have to be impartial as they historically represented certain positions. I'm not too concerned about that as long as you, as a reader and user of that medium, know what you're dealing with. It's true that when you distort information, manipulate reality, you lose people's trust, especially among those under 35-30. Many say they have stopped reading newspapers because they manipulate reality. In the case of EFE, as it is a wholesaler, the information it produces must be usable by everyone—national, local, or international media—and that's very difficult. To make your information usable by all those media, it has to be very standardized. So, an agency must be very careful to be as impartial as possible. Perfection doesn't exist, but we have to try.
"In our case, the public agency should mean not a government agency but an agency of society as a whole, of citizens"Today, we also have the emergence of AI. What does this addition mean for journalism?
I think we're all still very confused. The style guide of EFE, published a few months ago, makes a reference to artificial intelligence, basically saying that anything we say about using AI today might need to be revised in six months. We believe that artificial intelligence can be an aid in a journalist's work, but it cannot do journalism. We shouldn't let it do journalism.
Editorial decisions about what is news and what is not, how we title a story, where we place emphasis, how we ensure that people understand—that's our job as journalists.
Have you thought about implementing it from EFE, and if so, how?
Yes, in fact, we are still experimenting with a tool being developed that helps with certain tasks, suggesting things. For example, one of the headaches of an agency journalist is that headlines are limited to 90 characters. Sometimes, fitting a title is very difficult, so we have been testing where you write the information, and it gives you several headlines. But it's very difficult to know where the limit will be, and it also has a downside that concerns me. How can AI be used by sources? Journalists today have to be very careful when, for example, validating a video or an image. It's very easy, so to speak, to be fooled. You've probably seen these videos, deep fakes, where it seems like you're seeing someone say something in their own voice, but it's not true. And then we have to figure out how we use AI without it controlling us. AI must help us and free us from tedious tasks that are part of our job as journalists. But journalism—knowing what's news, how to tell it, where the emphasis should be, how to make people understand—that should be done by us.
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