Sofía Weissenborn
On the 22th of February, a class of journalism students had the opportunity to talk per video call to a prestigious journalist who was befriended with their teacher Mario Saavedra.
There were around 25 students who participated in the session which lasted around 90 minutes in total.
Eduardo Suarez is a journalist who has worked as an opinion writer and a foreign correspondent from London, New York, and Brussels for 14 years for the Spanish newspaper “El Mundo”. He has covered the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign for Univision and has published three books on American politics. He also founded the news startup “Politibot” and the Spanish newspaper “El Español”. He has been the Head of Editorial at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism since 2019. In this role, he is in charge of publications and communications and establishes and executes an in-depth editorial strategy with the goal of addressing the demands of media executives, journalists, editors, and entrepreneurs who shape journalism worldwide.
The first half of the conversation was about Eduardo Suarez giving a speech about his experience in journalism and the main challenges he believes exist in this era of media and news.
The main topics were news avoidance, polarisation, trust issues in the media industry, the changing expectations of news consumers etc. The discussion involved important themes such as Artificial Intelligence and Chat GPT and how these new technologies should not be a threat to the journalist work but an opportunity and a useful tool to make the work quicker. Journalists must keep combating the news avoidance and keep offering solutions around the challenge on how to make news less negative and more focused on possible future solutions and outlooks. The news panorama is also shifting. There are more and more news posted on social media, while people tend to not access them directly through the main websites. At least this happens in Spain and Latin America, Suarez tells us. On social media platforms, people tend to avoid commenting on open platforms since they are toxic spaces with a big amount of negative comments.
Suarez also told us about the fact that in the media markt, “the winner takes it all”, meaning, most of the big enterprises are earning less money than the big known companies such as NYT or The BBC.
The second part prioritised the questions the students wanted to ask Mister Suarez. They were related to the future challenges of news, politics and also related to AI. Suarez explained why the visual way of communicating became so popular and important in this digital age. He also listed the skills a journalist must have in order to be a good one: Curiosity and having an open mind. He also explained that the way journalists would gain political trust would be through avoiding political integrity, since it was rather irrelevant for most of the people and to put more emphasis on the big picture. Journalists should also not forget their ethical standards, in fact, newspapers should strengthen their standards to keep up with the fake news, news propaganda and the people who pretend to be journalists. They should, indeed, be open and transparent about their background. In order to reach the state of “non-bias”, journalists should report the stories with an open mind, be aware of their own bias and keep it in check or, if necessary, work against it. The standards must, therefore, be placed before ideology. Lastly, Suarez mentioned that the trust of media did not only depend on journalists but also the political pressure, the polarisation of a nation and also the different institutions.
At the end of the lesson, the students gave Eduardo Suarez a round of applause to show the appreciation for the call.
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