Journalists, as we have known them, are becoming obsolete. It’s not just that many reporters and editors at mainstream publications, doomed by a changed commercial reality, are losing jobs that will never return. (Though, of course, they are.) What’s more important is that the nature of the job, and what it takes to be effective, are changing quickly and dramatically.
I think that the journalist of the future will look a lot like Kara Andrade, whom I recently spoke with. Kara’s career began in social services: She worked in an assisted living facility, then did outreach for a rape crisis center, developed a street outreach plan targeting HIV-vulnerable homeless and drug users; and worked with an alcohol and drug advocacy program.
Kara went to journalism school, and turned herself into a writer-photographer-multimedia expert. She has reported on issues as diverse as New Orleans flood victims and emergency workers; emerging technologies, bioterrorism; and environmental conflict in Guatemala. At the same time, she has developed Web content for the Maynard Institute, a non-profit that pushes for diversity in the media world; directed online strategy for Youth Radio; organized a series of training conferences for the Renaissance Journalism Center; and, most recently, headed fundraising and community organizing at Spot.Us, David Cohn’s effort to crowdfund investigative journalism.
Which is, all things considered, quite a lot in the space of a decade. Now, Kara has returned to her native Guatemala, where she is conducting research on emerging online journalism and creating a collaborative web site that allows Guatemalans to post information from their cell phones.
It is a role that neatly connects her various professional strands: researcher, community organizer, journalist. And it feels right to her: “I want to be doing this all my life, where I’m an instrument of change. I want to be part of the process, not just a product. Want to help people get the information they need to navigate their lives.”
Which strikes me as the perfect articulation of an emerging class of journalist. These workers will connect people to information that’s urgent, relevant, and valuable. They will help people parse an increasingly daunting ocean of data, factoids, and voices, expertly guiding them to intelligence that helps them participate effectively in their communities, in the economy, in society. They will help communities organize around information, catalyzing solutions that speed change and impact.
This work will require traditional journalistic skills – the ability to find dig efficiently through data, to develop trusted sources, to ask the right questions, and to synthesize disparate information. It also will hinge on traditional journalistic values: accuracy, fairness, and independence, among others.
But these new journalists also will bring the mindset of a community organizer. Rather than deciding what should be reported, and how, they will enable conversations. As Michael Skoler, currently a Reynolds Fellow at the University of Missouri, told us: “Journalists have assumed that they know the key issues that audiences need to know about. But that model is gone; it’s audiences/communities that will determine the issues. The new role of the reporter is more like that of a good talk show host: someone who is knowledgeable about a topic, has wide range of contacts, injects some truth-telling into a conversation, and then has the resources to do follow-up reporting that will inform the next conversation. They’re ‘trusted hosts.’”
Journalists will be all about making connections, with and through information. They will help people, as Kara says, navigate their lives. They will “rouse” people, in the long-ago words of Knight-Ridder co-founder Jack Knight, “to pursue their true interests.”
Contributor Profile: Keith
Keith Hammonds is director of Ashoka’s News & Knowledge initiative, a new program funded by the Knight Foundation to identify, seed, and connect social entrepreneurs whose innovations promise to better inform and engage change-making citizens.
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