Adding value: What journalists need to do now
From Phil Meyer, speaking on the occasion of a two-day symposium marking his retirement as Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication:
The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it — digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.
This is why we still need newspapers — or something like them.
Phil has been an inspiration to many of us in both professions (journalism and journalism education) because he advocates this kind of thinking about journalism:
Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. … Citizens, to be enlightened, need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand … the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won’t do that.
Unlike a lot of journalists, Phil has never been scared off by academic theory. Unlike a lot of professors, he understands what’s at the heart of journalism:
Last week, a newspaper reporter asked me why, at the age of 77, I care so much about the future of journalism. “I have grandchildren,” I explained. But there is more to it than that. I want the work of journalism and journalism education to advance, to be cumulative. I want the conversation to continue.
Phil, congratulations on your retirement. I hope we’ll still be seeing a lot of your wise and cogent writing in the future.
Leave a Reply