Journalism Is In Crisis. Here's How We Can Help The Next Generation Save It

Talk to people who work in politics these days and they will tell you the biggest problem is not that Americans get their news from sources that are too right-leaning or too left-leaning.

The problem is they don’t get the news at all.

At least not news that doesn’t concern their favorite sports team or pop idol.

This is a growing problem as the monoculture fades and is replaced by tiny isolated bubbles of like-minded consumers, all coalesced around a single topic, each with its own lingo, celebrities and POV.

“Feudal Media” if you will.

With news, much of the avoidance is driven by a desire to escape what seems to be an extreme news cycle full of anger and bad news, in conjunction with the emergence of feudal media which allows people to completely avoid coming into contact with political news of any sort.

Which makes the role of journalists much more critical: how do we train the next generation of journalists and what skills will they need? 

That was the topic of a forum I was lucky enough to attend last week at the legendary Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo, courtesy of my friend and Tokyo tour guide, Doug Montgomery.

The panelists included leading international journalists and academics working in Japan, and the audience, primarily students, was equally diverse.

A clear consensus arose that the job prospects for young journalists were in decline, due in large part to the decline in traditional print media, with the specter of AI making those prospects even more dim.

At the same time, a cadre of “news influencers” has sprung up on social media, many of whom have no journalism training whatsoever, and thus no idea that, say, reporting a story from The Wall Street Journal or The Guardian without crediting the author or the publication is bad form.

The unchallenged consensus on this was that there is a massive need for a greater emphasis on news literacy worldwide. Meaning that students need to be taught from an early age to differentiate fact from opinion, to question the sources of their news and to identify sources that are traditionally reliable.

Which then feeds into what we teach journalism students, which is to make sure their facts are always reliable so that they stand out as an unimpeachable source of truth. 

That includes being objective in their reporting rather than blatantly partisan.

One suggestion (okay, from me, but it seemed to go over well) on how to handle the current job market, was to also provide students with a crash course in modern media entrepreneurship—how to launch a Substack or a YouTube channel, how to promote it, how to monetize it.

Launching, running and promoting an independent business is a skill set that journalists were not expected to have—running a Substack is markedly different from being a freelancer—but it’s also not completely unexpected.

The bigger question is how do young journalists maintain credibility at a time when algorithms seem to reward the most extreme voices, the most vocally partisan ones.

That, the panelists acknowledged, is where media literacy comes in, teaching people to ignore those partisan voices in favor of more unbiased ones.

This may be easier said than done though, as partisan voices tend to be far more entertaining.

It is necessary however, in that so much is riding on someone fairly reporting what is going on in the world.

Future journalists will also need to learn to manage a slew of new AI-based tools, that can turn their stories into audio and video, create clips for social media and the like,

It’s an exciting time, with no real roadmap, and so the path is wide open for anyone with drive and determination.

If all goes well, a new generation of real, professionally trained journalists will emerge to replace the people who just cosplay at being one on social media, and audiences will learn to seek them out as sources of truth, eschewing the cosplayers as sources of entertainment.

Who knows, stranger things have happened.