Why is journalism important and worth doing?
I’m pretty passionate about journalism; and I’d like to say a few things about that, to put our efforts here in context.
So it comes down to this: without a free press there is no free society.
Any country without a free press is an authoritarian country. The “fourth estate,” as the press was once called, is an essential pillar of any democratic society.
There has to be a source of information that citizens can trust, that is neither commercial advertising, nor political propaganda. Journalism is one of the most important pillars of democracy, right up there with a transparent electoral process and an honest judiciary.
At the end of the day, it is journalists who keep the judiciary, the politicians, and the businesspeople honest. It’s a grand and honourable tradition.
Why is small-town journalism in particular important and worth doing?
Sure, that all sounds very noble and important, but sometimes small-town journalism feels… trivial. There are so many Big Events going on in the Big World, and covering the small-potatoes news of a remote island like ours can feel insignificant.
But it’s very important for every community to have some kind of “newspaper” or its equivalent. If we do responsible journalism, then we offer our community a better source of information than gossip and hearsay. That alone is worth doing.
Also, every small town newspaper had a “morgue” (the storage space where back issues were preserved forever). The accumulation of small-town journalism, over time, is the history book that documents your community. The Currents archives are already popular with people doing research on bits of local history; as we keep reporting on our community’s news, we are writing that history book for people in the future to read.
Even if you aren’t doing cutting-edge investigative reporting, unmasking villainies and confronting injustices, there’s a lot of value and importance in keeping an accurate record of the daily life of your community. The life of your community matters. It is important for your community to see itself accurately reflected in an historical record that people trust.
So that’s why I think quality journalism is worthwhile, even if you’re not on the city desk of a major newspaper and will never be shortlisted for a Pulitzer.
What are the primary responsibilities of a journalist?
There is just one sacred duty of every journalist. And that is to tell the truth to the best of your ability. If you lie to your readers, if you make stuff up or suppress information or misrepresent or spin… then you are a fiction writer, or an ad copywriter, or a propagandist — but you’re not a real journalist.
A journalist’s first and only loyalty is to the truth. Only by telling the truth can you keep the trust of your readership, and your own integrity.
What does this mean in practise? It means the two most important words in journalism: FACT CHECK. You don’t publish until you have fact-checked your content.
Sometimes you still get something wrong. A source misinforms you. A misprint creeps in. It’s only human to make an error now and then… but an ethical news outlet always prints retractions and corrections.
When you get it wrong, you fess up and correct the record. You take the time to acknowledge and correct your errors. No matter how trivial the error is — even if you got the date of someone’s birthday wrong and the town’s oldest inhabitant is really 93, not 92 as you reported — the best practise is to make a public, documented correction.
Yes, documented — when you make a correction, you should report that you made a correction! If you make editorial changes to a published article online — anything more than trivial typo and grammar corrections — anything that actually alters the content — you need to document (in end notes) that the text was altered, and when, and why.
When you quote a source, quote that person accurately; don’t cherrypick their words to misrepresent their position or opinion. Don’t put attributed statements in quotation marks, unless they are the actual words that were said to you (and preferably recorded by you, so you can prove they were said to you!). If you elide some words from a verbatim quote, use ellipses to make it clear that you made a cut for brevity.
In other words, never deceive your reader. That is the sin for which you go to journalism hell.
This applies to pictures as well as words. If you use an old photograph to illustrate a local event, because you didn’t get a good one this year… make sure it’s captioned as “photograph from 2019” (or whenever). And credit your photos properly.
If you use AI generated illustrations for a story, disclose this in the captions or end notes. If you use an AI generated voice to read a quote block for the podcast version, document that fact too. Wherever there is a chance for the reader to “get the wrong impression,” it is your duty as a journalist to make sure they can’t.
Journalism vs Opinion, and Journalistic Balance
Try to maintain a clear distinction between your opinion as a writer, and journalism. I know — none better! — that this can be a challenge at times, but your opinion has no place in a news story: your opinion is for the Op/Ed page of a paper, or the category we call Opinion on our Currents web site.
A news story is the reporting of facts.
If you feel strongly about those facts, by all means write an editorial — and flag it as an editorial. Both news reporting and editorials are valid forms of journalism… just don’t get them mixed up.
Sometimes people disagree about what the facts are. Where any controversy arises, it’s your responsibility as a journalist to acknowledge — and if possible interview — the various sides of an issue. On the other hand, your responsibility doesn’t end there, with both-sides-ism.
There’s an old saying about journalism, my favourite actually: if one source tells you the weather is fine, and another source tells you it’s raining, you don’t just “quote both sides” in your article and call it a day. It’s your responsibility as a journalist to open the goddamn window and find out whether it’s raining or not!
Fact-checking includes your sources, not just the information you research and contribute to the piece. If you quote a person who is lying, it’s valid journalism to quote them verbatim — but it’s lazy journalism if you don’t also do a quick fact check on their assertions.
“Mr Fox says ‘I was never near the hen-house,’” is perfectly legitimate reporting if that’s what he actually told you… but if your article ignores the 16 dead chickens and the security camera footage, you’re not a real journalist.
Currents has a fairly extensive Code of Ethics. Read it. We will not accept stories that violate our policies. And if you only remember two words from what I’ve said here, those words should be… FACT CHECK.
[Full disclaimer: I am not a professional journo, but a heartfelt amateur who writes for a very small town news outlet; we can’t afford to print paper copy, so we run a website for local news. Nevertheless, despite our pipsqueak size and limited scope, we try to maintain professional standards. Because it matters.]