Why is it so hard to predict the future of journalism? And why we should keep doing it
We are all tired of hearing the question: what is the future of journalism? Is there a model that will “save” vehicles? Which will it be?
Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, where I studied, has been trying to answer these questions for decades. Without success, he himself admits, in an interview with El País:
I can be a fraud. I do not claim to be right.
During the classes — that happened on Monday mornings, Jeff made a point of showing all his failed predictions. But he would tell us: “You are the one who will save journalism.” Another fateful prediction? Perhaps.
More important than finding the “solution”, I believe, is to encourage journalists to understand how business works. Also from the interview with El País:
The evidence is clear: we need to change. There are many opportunities. As long as we see the Internet as a threat, we will be disturbed. If we look at the Internet as the basis for changing our relationship with the public, there is starting point for something. In fact, I do not think I was radical enough.
It was precisely through this uneasiness that he managed to encourage the class. Well, I can only speak for myself and say that although I do not completely agree with his optimism about technology, I have found an important point in common with Jarvis: the idea that journalism needs to serve a community. And one of the most important needs is conversation, civilized debate, bridge reconstructions:
We need to rethink what journalism serves in society, start tackling problems and learning from other disciplines. If we are very polarized and communities do not understand each other, we need to build bridges.
In my humble opinion, Jeff Jarvis makes predictions with two main purposes: (1) to increase the limits of journalists’ imagination, so that we move away from our "rice and beans" (a Brazilian expression that means "ordinary", "common")and bring forth other futures; (2) to provoke a discussion, especially to generate arguments that contradict his own predictions; the mere intellectual exercise of disagreeing and trying to dismantle what Jarvis says strengthens debate and the knowledge about our area.
In the many conversations I had with him about Me Explica (the explanatory news platform that I built in Brazil), Jeff always encouraged me to think big, to value the skills I developed with my project over six years. For him, risking is always more productive than standing still waiting for an answer to fall from the sky. Jeff is the kind of thinker who, while not seeming as academic as the pundits we have (especially in Brazil), manages to put thought (and action) in motion.
Read Jeff Jarvis’s complete interview with El País (in Portuguese): https://brasil-elpais-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/07/ 12 / culture / 1562885709_674849.amp.html
