Investigative Journalism Needs to be Well Funded

Just imagine, one day your boss coming to you and saying, "Hey, you're not going to get paid anymore because people prefer not to pay for things." Of course people prefer free stuff. It's free!

Journalists work and therefore they need to get paid. I'm not just saying this because I'm majoring in journalism and have worked/interned in different news outlets but because I really do think that it's one of the most important pillars in a democracy.

Journalism is not about just sitting and waiting for a press release to appear and then rewrite it. There are so many journalists that go out and conduct shoe-leather reporting, get the story, sometimes endangering their lives, and all to keep us informed and to keep those in positions of power accountable.  That's what journalism is for me. It's such an important part of a democratic society that we cannot write of journalists' work as something less than.


So are journalists going to become just contributors like Chris Anderson says in "Free! Why Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business"? No, absolutely not. Journalists need resources, training and tools to do their work. And they also have to eat.

In  "Dear Malcolm: Why so Threatened?" Chris Anderson brings up his parenting blog and how he started to need contributors because of how big the audience got. I can see how his "non-monetary rewards" might work for blogs but how can they successfully work in journalism. If people are going to become contributors then where will all the journalists who know the ins and outs of their field go?

Anderson is basically saying that because people are less likely to pay for information journalists shouldn't get paid either. He says "There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing."


Just think about the information we have gotten out of the Panama Papers leak. This is the biggest leak in history with over a 11 million documents. The Süddeutsche Zeitung received the leak and then handed the information to The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. More than 370 journalists from about 80 countries around the world worked and investigated the information for a year. Those journalists had to have funds, resources and tools to investigate.

In a piece titled "The best job in the world: Gabriel Garcia Marquez on journalism," Marquez says that with the "arrival of technology" that the newsrooms became more like "laboratories." It is important, he says, to have "A well-informed writer" that can "piece the fragments together, adding background and other relevant details as if reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single vertebra."

And if those are not enough reasons to why journalism and journalists should be well funded, here are the words of Mark Ruffalo, who portrayed one of the reporters in the film Spotlight investigating the systemic child sex abuse by many Catholic priest in Boston.

"Why journalism is so important and why it's important to fund it and to have long-lead journalists [sic] stories, is that they can trace down the facts and the truth to a point where it's just inconceivable that can be anything else in what they come upon."

Ads You Ignore, Ads You Share

I am not an advertising student, but rather a consumer. This blog post will be about how I look at ads and well… consume them. A while ago, I lost the quick release to my tripod. So I did what most people with access to a computer and internet wouldn’t do – I called the store where I bought it and asked if they sold the part separately. After being transferred and waiting on the line for quite some time, I got a hold of a woman who didn’t know the answer to my question.

I went online and I found the part after a few clicks, but held off from buying it. I stored the quick release in the back of my mind, where it did not stay for long.  About two days after my search I saw an ad in my email account. It was the quick release.

“They know,” I said.

According to Tom Lowery in “Why Mobile Is the Futureof Advertising and Marketing,” ads don’t fit in the print one-size-fits-all model, but instead work in the web which has “evolved into an internet revolving around individual needs.”

I agreed with Lowery when he said, “Click on a hotel website one minute and I’ll bet you see an ad for that hotel on Facebook later. It happens to me all the time.” That’s exactly what had happened to me with my quick release. I was not only getting ads on my email account but also on social media.

I don’t have to look at ads on TV, because I don’t have one. It’s different online, and advertisers have found a way to know what I’m looking for and then remind me that I may want to purchase it. Which is fine for them. They have to make a living, too. I just want to turn away from ads. Not all ads (which I will get to). Ignoring them is a feat because they're everywhere, physically and digitally.

In the article "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen say that managers have to know what type of product there are dealing with, the markets that are emerging and who they are selling to. I see it this way: ads opened up the market for ad blockers when they started going online. Advertisers then needed to find a way back to their target audience. Bower and Christensen say that “companies must give managers of disruptive innovation free rein to realize the technology’s full potential – even if it means ultimately killing the mainstream business.”

TV ads are no longer than maybe 20 or so seconds and people just pick up the remote and click away. It’s a different story online, where they can last three minutes or more. You still have the option to click away, but if you get hooked in you will most likely stay. TED recognizes ads that “people want to see and share.” I like watching ads with a story. If an ad is able to catch my attention, I will watch the entire thing before moving on to my YouTube video. After all, not all ads are trying to sell a product. Some are meant to bring awareness.

Take for example “The Clock is Ticking” ad by the Girl Effect organization with the goal to bring awareness of the potential harms poverty can have on adolescent girls. And I bet many people have seen the public announcement “DumbWays to Die” by Metro Trains in Australia promoting rail safety.

Some ads have evolved from just appearing in front of you to actually getting you to share them because of their content and story.

‘This above all: to thine own self be true’: Authenticity in a time of mass consumption

While reading the article "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine" my mind kept thinking about how the definition of quality and better has changed over time and what we want as consumers. 

Robert Capps states that the MP3 effect and "other Good Enough Technologies" have changed what qualities we value. He states that in this age it seems that flexibility, convenience, quick and dirty qualities are preferred over fidelity, features and slow and polished qualities. 

Simon Fleming-Wood from Pure Digital defined "better" as how easy and accessible an action is. When using their products, a consumer can easily shoot video and then just as easily and quickly share it with whomever they want. For Pure Digital being "better" is not about the resolution of an image or the features their devices offer. It's about how easy they can make a task. It gets the task done

And even though, according to Forbes, vinyl sales continue to rise, many people prefer the MP3's sound (if we are going by the study conducted by Professor Jonathan Berger from Stanford University). Some people prefer that sound because they have become "accostumed" and think that music is supposed to sound like that.

In the TED Talk “What Consumers Want,” management advisor and author Joseph Pine says that consumers are looking for authentic experiences. There is no such thing as an "inauthentic" experience, he says, just as there is no such thing as a "natural" one. 

Pine defines authenticity with the verses spoken by Polonius in Hamlet: 

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

But being authentic is a little bit complicated. Authenticity has two dimensions, he points out, which are being true to oneself and being what it says it is. This results in four outcomes: Real Fake, Real Real, Fake Fake and Fake Real. Here is the chart:

Is what it says it is                       Real Fake                                        Real Real

Is Not what it says it is                 Fake Fake                                       Fake Real

                                          
                                                Is Not true to itself                               Is true to itself

The best is to be Real Real and the worst is being Fake Fake. Pine says that a company achieves authenticity by knowing their "heritage" and what they represent. He gives advice for both businesses and consumers. 

For the business people there are three simple rules: 

1.  Only say you are authentic if you really are authentic 
2. It's a lot easier to be authentic if you don't say you are
3. If you are going to say that you are authentic, then you better be authentic

For the consumer he only has this to say: "What will make us happy is spending our time and our money satisfying the desire for authenticity."  

Let's not forget the external factors in play...

Leaving no child with “insert new technology here,” isn’t anything new. In order to achieve academic progress, a plan of implementation and proper training must be put into action when it comes to the introduction of new technology in a classroom.

Uruguay began their Plan CEIBAL in 2007 with the goal to give every primary student a laptop. The plan was a part of the much bigger initiative One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an organization that wanted to distribute these devices to children in developing countries. In Uruguay, the students used the laptop at school and they could also take it home.

By 2009, according to the BBC, 362,000 students and 18,000 teachers were already taking part of the program. Teachers had the option of how much they wanted to implement the tool inside their curriculum. Of all the children given these laptops, 70 percent of them didn’t have access to one at home.

The expectation was that with computers in hand would make schools “connected, particularly those in rural areas, where many still don’t have internet access.” One teacher even called it a “revolution.”

But it was far from it…

The Instituto de Economía in Uruguay (Economics Institute in English) published a report in Spanish showing that the laptops had no impact in the students’ academic performance in the subject of math and reading. They concluded that technology alone could not impact the student’s learning by itself.

To read a little bit more about the results you can read the Inter-American Development Bank blog which is in English.  

The percentage of students using the laptops “every” or “almost every day” dropped from 41 percent in 2009 to a bit over 4 percent in 2012. Students used the laptop to download information more than 40 percent of the time and only 8 percent of the “activity was ‘writing a text.”

Technology alone cannot be the only playing factor in increasing student academic performance. There are many other intersectional factors that come into play like qualified teachers, well equipped classrooms and a good support system and environment.

Because, after all, it shouldn’t be about appearing to be on the path toward progress but about actually accomplishing objectives. What good is giving every kid a laptop or tablet if they are not going to being trained on how to use it to further their academic education?

In the New York Times article, “No Child Left Untableted,” chief executive of Amplify Joel Klein said that it’s not just about “stick[ing] a kid in front of a screen for eight hours and hope it works.” It’s about how teachers use the device and how they implement it in their classrooms.

“If it’s not transformative,” he told The New York Times. “It’s not worth it.”

Klein said that K-12 isn’t working even though the amount of money spent on education has doubled. But these tablets are still not going to be worth it if we don’t take into consideration the environment the students live in. Because after school, where they have access to internet, they will eventually go home. And what if they don’t have access to internet there? Then what?

And under what circumstance are they able to use this technology? I’ve heard from one high school student in the panhandle of Texas who said she paid $30 dollars for the borrow. What about those who can’t afford it, I asked. Then they don’t get to take one home. Meanwhile another student in central Texas said that her school allowed her to borrow the tablet for a fee of $50. The next year, her school allowed the students to borrow them without a charge. Unfair, the high schooler said, because she had to pay as a freshman.

I am not against implementing technology, but we cannot ignore the external factors that also come into play. I think it is important for children to be taught digital literacy, but placing technology in front of a student is not even addressing the issue. If the goal is to improve academic performance, then we should also address the learning environment, quality of teachers and what is expected of students. We need to keep the information that is being taught up to date, not just the learning equipment.  

Print newspapers need more than just a facelift

When I told my parents that I was going to study journalism, the first thing out of my father’s mouth was, “Saliste de Guatemala para Guatepeor. If you don’t die of hunger someone is going to kill you.” Here’s a little context: my parents come from a country with an infamous reputation of killing journalists: Mexico.

According to a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 35 journalists have been murdered between 1992 and 2015, and those are just the ones with a confirmed motive. The motives behind the killings of another 42 journalists have not been confirmed.   

So those were the words of a worried father. Despite all of this, I continued in my pursuit of journalism. I will admit that at first I wanted to write only for print. This way of thinking soon changed after I was exposed to video, then quickly editing on Adobe Premiere Pro, and moving on to handling audio. Some stories need to be told in different platforms. The medium you choose to tell a story will depend on the story itself. Still, I also don’t want to abandon newspapers… I just don’t want to limit my storytelling platforms.

So the big question is: When are newspapers going to die out? Personally I don’t think they will… if the people handling them are smart and innovative enough.

In a 2009 TED Talk, Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko spoke about how redesigning newspapers and focusing on the content started to take Eastern European newspapers towards a different direction.

 

In Russia newspaper circulation went up 29 percent on the third year. Poland also saw similar raise in circulation up to 35 percent on the third year. Meanwhile in Bulgaria circulation went up 100 percent.

“Design was just apart of the process,” Utko said. “The process we made was not about changing the look, it was about improving the product completely.”

This echoes what I’ve been learning in my Journalism and Press Freedom class. The newspapers in Latin America that have gained readership and change the way newspapers go about reporting are those that have a focus on investigative journalism. It’s those who keep true to the watchdog role. A few examples are Reforma, El Norte, (both from Mexico) and La Prensa (from Panama). Granted these papers were established before the turn of the century, and they have often been targeted due to the corruptness.
 
Newspapers will stay alive only if they are able to find the target audience that wants to keep them alive. This can happen through redesign and investigative journalism.