What is the future of news? Will the public know more or less in the internet age? These questions were the focus of a panel discussion marking the launch of the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 22 October.

Shrinking international news budgets, bureau closures, the rise of the freelancer and the citizen journalist all made for gloomy prognoses for the business-as-usual news model, agreed the panel chaired by The Times columnist, David Aaronovitch.

From left: David Aaronovitch, Amie Ferris-Rotman, Rachel Briggs and Richard Sambrook in conversation at the Frontline Club.

In the internet age, where journalists are no longer exclusive gate-keepers of publishing platforms, access to unprecedented amounts of information had not necessarily resulted in better informed audiences, said Richard Sambrook, director of Cardiff University’s journalism centre.

“One of the paradoxes is that we have more information out there than ever and less trust in it than ever,” he said.

Reuters correspondent Amie Ferris-Rotman said the days of traditional foreign correspondents and news agencies parachuting foreign reporters in to do “white saviour journalism” were numbered.

She urged news agencies to invest in training local staff who “often produce better stories simply because they know their countries better”. Above all, the industry must resist ‘deprofessionalisation’.

“Because of what’s happened with the internet people think [journalism is] a hobby, something you should get for free,” said Ferris-Rotman. “This is totally unacceptable. If we don’t change this the world will suffer enormously and get less of a full picture.”

South African freelance journalist and trainer Raymond Joseph then joined the discussion via Skype. He told of efforts to reach remote communities by building investigative tools to gather user generated content.

Joseph said the challenge for journalists was to cut through the “cacophony” of social media noise and empower audiences to become competent news gatherers:

“Increasingly we’re digging up those voices. But we’re going to have to do the journalism because with all those voices out there we have to sort the news from the noise.”

Yet another perspective was offered by Rachel Briggs, director of Hostage UK, an NGO working with hostages and their families.

Briggs said new platforms had empowered news subjects to publish their message directly, highlighting the example of Mike Haines, who turned to YouTube to address audiences after IS militants murdered his brother David Haines.

But Briggs warned these platforms were also available to “the bad guys” with IS now “effectively running its own news channel”. Access to such graphic content presented new challenges to editorial judgement, she said, not only in news rooms but also for users of social media.

In the discussion that followed, the panel agreed that the explosion of raw information online was both a blessing and a curse for journalists, whose skills of objective verification were now needed more than ever.

“We’ve got a whole world opened up to us but it’s a very dangerous world if we’re just going to dive into it,” said Joseph, and praised the rise of verification tools and agencies.

“The same rules apply that have always applied,” said Ferris-Rotman. “If you’re a good journalist you’ve live by certain principles, you’ve been trained a certain way to think objectively to have freedom of bias, to present a nuanced view of events.”

This was the enduring value of journalistic principles, said Sambrook, in an age where the lines were increasingly blurred for audiences between journalism, PR, propaganda, advertising and lobbying.

“In this new environment if [the public] don’t understand that difference there’s a problem. . . . they’re consuming junk food without realising it.”

You can watch the event and listen again here:

On Wednesday 22 October, the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine launched at the Frontline Club. The magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, introduced the issue and handed over to author and columnist, David Aaronovitch, who chaired the accompanying debate on the future of journalism.

Aaronovitch initiated the discussion by asking each panellist to speak individually on the future of journalism before inviting the audience to partake.

Rachael Jolly (right) gives an introduction and speaks briefly on the Index on Censorship magazine launch.

Richard Sambrook, professor and director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University and former Director of BBC World Service, suggested that we will be better informed “if we want to be”. The panel and the audience returned repeated to this theme that we now have access to more information than ever before, but also have to be more discerning about the source of that news.

In our technology-led society, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate journalists from citizen reporters. And Raymond Joseph, former editor of the South African Sunday Times, who joined the panel via Skype from South Africa, said that we must ask numerous questions before trusting a source: “How do you know? Who do you know? What do you know?”

“Today you need to be platform agnostic,” Joseph continued. “You need to separate news from the noise.”

While everyone agreed that Twitter was a powerful journalistic tool that journalists couldn’t afford not to use, Sambrook also took to task how we define journalism. He debated whether “any expression in the public space is journalism”, and concluded that “just because you heard something doesn’t make it journalism . . . it is raw information”. It is what you do with it that matters.

From left: David Aaronovitch, Amie Ferris-Rotman, Rachael Briggs and Richard Sambrook.

Rachel Briggs, Director of Hostage UK, said that the public is also beginning to lose trust in the media and this is somewhat due to people being “fed up with the way . . . the media is so mediated”.

Media sources are also unwilling to invest in hiring local reporters in other countries. “Foreign reporting still relies unfortunately on the . . . model of the white saviour, often male,” said Amie Ferris-Rotman, former correspondent for Reuters in Afghanistan and Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. But she also revealed the startling statistic that the “British media has 40% less international coverage than it did 30 years ago.”

Aaronovitch said that “[news] organisations become almost completely disconnected from abroad” as they do not know or understand information to the same extent as local journalists.

A panel of young and future journalists joined the experts with fresh ideas. Priyanka Mogul, Journalism and Human Rights student at Kingston University, said that with the huge amount of information available, at least it is “becoming impossible to be someone who doesn’t know what is going on”.

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship, commented on the youth panel:

The @Index_Magazine launch youth panel on #futurejournalism has been fabulous – insightful, optimistic and challenging

— Jodie Ginsberg (@jodieginsberg) October 22, 2014

You can watch the event and listen again here: