Everyone is a journal-ish

With the social media era behind us, tech-oligarchs want us to believe the future of everything is AI. For journalism, it means that avatars will report the news, generated by AI models, trained on the combined labor of every journalist, editor, and newsroom that’s ever posted online. Accuracy is traded for speed, where fast news is just as inflammatory as fast food. Everyone hates AI, except the bosses who bet the future on the prophecies of product makers. It’s no big surprise that these billionaires are the very same people who promised social media would be a flourishing ecosystem for journalism.

This dystopia is not inevitable. As Joe Strummer once wrote, “The future is unwritten.”

While the printing press made everyone an author, the mobile web made everyone a publisher. By posting online, everyone is a journal-ish, which refers to the capacity for any individual to function as a creator, distributor, and consumer of news. The future of journalism rests on adapting to the next digital turn with intention and inspiring the public to adopt “journal-ish imagination,” a mindset where the sourcing, veracity, and historical context of news stories inform decisions to trust and share news content.

While the headlines about the journalism industry are dire — including massive layoffs, closures, and consolidation — I remain optimistic. Journalists continue to serve a vital function in democracies by sorting, vetting, and synthesizing information and reporting out facts. News consumers still depend on receiving timely, accurate local knowledge (TALK), especially in times of crisis. But the vast abundance of news posted online comes from various users (i.e., not journalists) or directly from politicians, activists, corporations, various professional associations, and so on. Journalists are competing for attention, not only with each other, but with all that other noise.

The challenge for journalism today is to realize that social media and mobile phones democratized the tools of publishing and broadcasting to every user without concern for how the public would use such powerful tools. For years, I’ve studied the negative consequences of these products as they increased disinformation, rage bait, and harassment on a massive scale. On the upside, it’s also produced a vibrant ecosystem of news-y creators producing videos, podcasts, websites, newspapers, magazines, and more. I dare to say there is more “journal-ish” content online than the journalism industry would like to admit.

As a professor, I’m excited by this, because it shows that interest in news media is abundant, even as the journalism industry statistically appears to be in decline. Some news leaders remain nostalgic for the revival of print, or hope to return to a time of corporate gatekeepers. But there is no way to uninvent social media, nor is there is a reason to believe that AI will replace everything. So where do we go from there?

Everyone with a smartphone has the tools of journalism in their pockets, but users lack the skill sets, ethical principles, and habits of the heart required of professional journalists that make the news trustworthy. Instead of thinking of technological change as the death knell of news media, there is a huge opportunity ahead for education of the general public on the ethics and methods of journalism. Universities, especially, should make basic journalism courses part of common core education, because they usually cover far more than media literacy. Today all students, no matter their field, need to know how to fact-check, verify sources, vet news outlets, employ investigative methods, apply ethics, judge newsworthiness, engage in media criticism, assess AI slop, gain writing experience, and use multimedia tools.

Instead of AI writing the future of journalism, we need to return to organizing the profession around its moral, ethical, and practical foundations and welcome in those curious to learn more.