Eva Rodríguez
Journalism faces one of its tougher periods in history. The connection between people and news media fades more every year. To understand how and why this is happening, the Reuters Institute 2023 report explains the main trends that journalism is going through. The head of editorial at the Reuters Institute, Eduardo Suárez, gave a lecture at Carlos III University in order to show the new generation of journalists the main challenges the profession has in our days.
The report shows the main trends in journalism right now. Among them, competition with social media, artificial intelligence, disinterest in news and mistrust of media outlets. In the case of social media, people rely on sites like Instagram and TikTok to get information. This makes it harder for journalists to gain money from their articles, since people think that they have enough information with the headline they read on social media. The danger of artificial intelligence also has to do with something similar. For example if a browser engine like Google were to change the way they work to something closer to ChatGPT articles could have less traffic. The hardest impact will be on smaller outlets that do not have the capacity to add Ai to their work. Bigger media outlets are even starting to use AI, for example to add context to a news article.
But the most worrying trends that the report shows have to do with disinterest and mistrust. They both have their origin in polarization. In the case of disinterest, Suarez explained how there are news-avoiders who do not engage on the news on purpose in order to not feel the pain of reality. If we look at political news, people often feel that most of the information given is irrelevant and only adds noise. Therefore, they do not engage in public debate. Issues with trust, on the other hand, have been proven to be connected with the institutions, when the citizens of a country trust their institutions, they will trust the media. However when there is more instability in the politics of a country or politicians explicitly attack the media, trust in journalists has been shown to go down. The irresponsibility shown by institutions when it comes to defending journalism from new technologies, like social media or Artificial Intelligence; or even from politicians themselves in a clear way will be the biggest challenge for the profession going forward.
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