I want to save journalism, but it needs to be worth saving

By Alexandra Wake

November 28, 2024

Journalism as a scholarly discipline is increasingly under pressure in the academy not just here in Australia but in other parts of the world, including the UK and US. Southern Cross University is just the latest to announce the phasing out of journalism … It won’t be the last as newspapers and regional newsrooms continue to close.

Many of us in the undergraduate space are being forced to reduce the core number of journalism subject offerings as students increasingly choose other media and communication subjects with sexier titles than journalism and democracy. In the post graduate space most of us are now under greater pressure from the cap on international students.

Of course, JERAA will continue to advocate on behalf of journalism, journalism education, our members, and for the value of the discipline that we love.

I know I am in good company here when I say that journalists are vital for helping explain a complicated world, particularly at times of war and during threats to democracy. This is no time to retreat from journalism.

But I also know  that we have some major issues to deal with as a profession and within the academy.  So I want to be honest rather than gloss over the problems.

One of my main concerns is that we as journalists are increasingly talking only to ourselves, as engagement with pure forms of journalism have become an expensive, and perhaps even an elitist activity.

I’ve noticed recently that I’ve stopped immediately  telling people I’m a journalist, or a journalism academic, because when I do – no matter where I am in the world – it inevitable leads to a conversation about what’s wrong with our profession.

I also count myself increasingly among the news avoiders, restricting my news diet to a fairly bland mixture of left learning news – It’s a long way from when I woke up in the morning, read multiple newspapers, listen to every ABC news bulletin, watched all the commercial news bulletins, and spend the day scrolling twitter to keep up with trends.

It’s not just because I’m a busy scholar with a family doing more than a fair load of academic housework. The journalism I consume often lacks context and history, is riddled with errors, and fixated on some issues that really are fairly niche – – I’m sure I’m not the only one yells at the news readers or subs the hard copy of the newspaper when it arrives on the weekend.

I want to be clear – I don’t think this is the fault of the young people who are doing their very best to report in often difficult circumstances, but rather a lack of senior staff and structures to support them.

In the past four months  I’ve been renewing and refreshing my journalism skills. I’ve spent time learning how to make vertical videos (tik toks), studying contemporary newsroom culture, I’ve done a deep dive into Constructive Journalism, I sat in  New York for a month during the US election at Columbia University listening to some of the world’s best experts,  and then I headed to Oman for an AI and journalism education conference.

If my time away has taught me  anything it is  that most of our industry – is fixated on the wrong things. We have become so out of touch with ordinary people and their concerns, and we are so busy trying to chase female news avoiders, particularly young ones,  that we haven’t noticed what the men are listening to … and we aren’t covering the stories that matter to working people, in a manner that they can understand.

In the US I spent a day with a legally settled refugee family in Queens a week before the election —  they clearly told me that everyone they knew was voting for Trump. There was just one issue that mattered to them – the economy – because if you can’t afford to feed your family you don’t care about abortion rights, renewables or even racism. The more the media attacked Donald Trump, the more they got behind him. They didn’t think he’d actually be able to do much, but at least he sounded like he cared.

The day before I left New York, three days after Trump was elected, I attended a lecture by Dr Musa al-Gharbi, author of Al We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.  His work describes how the news media – and also those of us in the academy – have lurched so far to the left that we have lost touch with ordinary people. The right hasn’t moved – it’s  us in the left who are the problem. He illustrated his point by showing a graphic of the number of times Trump was mentioned in the New York Times in the four years he was NOT president. The word Trump was the third most commonly used word in the newspaper, even though most of it was derogatory – the news media could not let go of him or his celebrity. Biden, and what he was doing with the economy, hardly got a look in.

Some of you will know start up media entrepreneur Alan Soon. He wrote in his last Splice newsletter that it is clear that it  is finally time to call the time-of-death of mainstream media and to focus on other parts of the information ecosystem. He reminded us all that that the core values or journalism  honesty: accuracy, trust, and integrity are not the exclusive domain of journalism, as much as we’d like to think we are.

I love journalism and journalism education. I know our value when we are at our very best. I want Alan Soon to be wrong – but it’s really up to all of us in the room to help prove that he is.  We can’t do that alone, we need help from educators focussed on media literacy, we need help from those in business and economics who can help with funding journalism.

Yes we need to get the AI and the platforms to help pay for the production of news, yes it’s going to get even harder getting people’s attention for issues that matter, and yes the personalisation of news from AI and our smart phones is going to make things exponentially worse, again.

But people haven’t turned off news just because the journalism business model has hollowed out newsrooms or the tech bros. have  played with our emotions and our attention  on toxic social media platforms: it really also us as journalists, and our professionalism.  We have failed to address the issues of normal people,  and let many in our industry destroy our credibility.

In my mind, we – journalists and  journalism scholars – need to find a way to rebuild our,  credibility so it’s not just that a slice of elite society that champion us.

I want to save journalism, but it needs to be worth saving.

I hope that at this conference we can take some time to talk about it. After all, the theme is Forward – Facing the next wave of journalism disruption.

This JERAA Conference Address was presented by JERAA President, Associate Professor Alexandra Wake in November 2024.