Digital age rewrites the role of journalism

By David Marsh, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 October 2012 11.54 BST    

 

Tweeters, bloggers, 'citizen journalists', all unheard of a decade ago, are changing the face of the news media and raising fundamental questions about reporting – and who pays for it

What makes someone a journalist? As recently as 10 years ago, the answer would have been straightforward: journalists made their living by producing editorial material (written or otherwise) which was then published or broadcast to an audience of readers, listeners or viewers.

In the new digital age of the web and social media, things are more complicated. If I tweet from a major news event – the Arab spring, say – is that journalism? If I start my own political blog, does that make me a journalist? If I'm a teacher, say, but contribute stories to a newspaper, does that make me a "citizen journalist"? Does it make any difference whether people are paid, or not, for such work? Should bloggers, tweeters and "citizen journalists" be held to, and judged by, the same standards as people working in more traditional journalistic roles?

These are not just arcane issues affecting the profession – the answers to such questions will affect the way our society is served by its media, and so touches everyone.

The Guardian & Observer chapel/branch of the National Union of Journalists, which represents 95% of journalists at the two papers and website – and 40% of the entire GNM staff – is in the forefront of debating such issues. 

A meeting we organised earlier this year called What is Journalism? provoked a thoughtful but lively debate about the future of the profession (or trade, as some would prefer to describe it).
One of our members, who blogs about politics for guardian.co.uk, said: "If journalism is telling people what they want to know, what I do is journalism. Blogging is broadcasting." Another said: "Tweeting is journalism. So is podcasting and Facebooking. Journalism is about investigating stories and knowing how to tell them."
But, while there was general agreement that opportunities to publish have never been greater, there were concerns about the future of quality journalism: in short, who is going to pay for it? A journalist who is also an academic put it like this: "Very few people make a living self-publishing, and none at all doing investigative journalism. Serious journalism is not commercial, and citizen journalism cannot sustain it."
So, while everyone at this company can be proud of the work done by NUJ members such as Nick Davies and his colleagues in exposing the phone-hacking scandal, such brilliant journalism will be sustained only if the company can finance it – which takes us back a year, to when my colleague Brian Williams wrote here that only time will tell if GNM's digital-first strategy is the answer to the search for a sustainable business model that currently preoccupies all publishers.
We are still waiting for the answer to that, but what we can say is that we, the journalists, should retain a powerful voice in what we do and how we do it. After all, we create the content: whether that content is words, pictures, audio or video; whether we are writers, editors, designers, or producers; whether it is published in print, on the web, via an app on your phone or tablet, or on social media – from a 140-character tweet to a 1,400-word comment article.
Whatever jobs we do, chapel members are committed to maintaining quality journalism at the Guardian and Observer through our collective efforts. That's not so easy when so many colleagues have left under the continuing voluntary redundancy scheme; while we remain completely opposed to compulsory redundancies, we have negotiated improved terms for those who wish to leave voluntarily as the company seeks to curb its substantial losses.
We have continued to press for greater accountability from the board of GNM, including staff representation on the remuneration committee (a policy frequently commended to other companies in the columns of our newspapers). We have also made considerable progress in negotiations towards a genuinely fair and transparent pay structure.
As the industry continues to search for a business model to support quality journalism, against a backdrop in which the very nature of journalism is being analysed in such detail, we will continue to use our collective strength to work for success for our products and everyone who works for them. As the saying goes, we are all in this together.

David Marsh is joint FoC of the Guardian & Observer NUJ chapel with Brian Williams and MoCs Anna Bawden and Kathy Whitfield.