Every industry has its buzzwords: Takeaways from #IJF16
The tenth edition of the International Journalism Festival is now over. Back from Perugia, here are my main takeaways from what I thought was the best International Journalism Festival edition to date. Before we dive into these, let me once again thank the festival team (Arianna and Chris, but also their logistic fairy behind the stage, Francesca). It is the passion of this team of people that makes this probably the best journalism festival in the world!
Every industry has its buzzwords, some are volatile, some are here to stay. At conferences and meetups around the world there are always some concepts and ideas that continue to pop up. This year’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia was no exception. We heard a lot about some buzzword such as ‘community’, ‘automation’, ‘social platforms’, ‘innovation’, ‘hacking’...
My favourite trend of this edition of the festival was definitely the one revolving around the word ‘cooperation’. I like to think that cooperation should be more than a buzzword and definitely more than just a passing trend in the world of journalism. I wish cooperation was here to stay in the news industry, especially if this could mean shifting the focus of journalism off the need for competition.
Cooperation vs. competition
The news industry has a long history of competition. Competition for the latest scoop, for advertising, competition to attract the most readers and so on. However, today we live in a world where people consume many sources of information at once and where it is harder and harder to argue the need for competition. Rather, we should think in terms of cooperation.
I was happy to see many speakers talking about the benefits of cooperation. It is not a taboo anymore, possibly thanks to the recent successful experience of collaborative investigation behind the Panama Papers, putting together 376 reporters in 80 countries and across newsrooms.
In an interesting session on journalism beyond competition, Erin Millar from Discourse Media and Anne-Lise Boyer from Journalism++ shared their experience around multi-newsroom cooperation. Both argued that the new challenges of journalism today require newsrooms to share resources, not compete. Only through cooperation, they said, can we reach greater impact.
I would go one step further and argue that newsrooms should also start building resources. It’s time news organisation realise that they can only benefit in building and sharing common technology that could help the industry as a whole to deliver better news. A great quote that sums this up was: “we can compete on stories, not on technology”. The thought came from Linda Sandvik who was an OpenNews Knight-Mozilla fellow at The Guardian in 2015. As a developer, I think she realises that when we talk about tech and journalism the focus should be on the journalism. The technology here is only the means and not the result.
With Superdesk (and all our other software) we are going exactly in that direction, building a new code base for journalism, pooling resources around the technology and sharing the keys to the core, for everyone to use, adapt, modify, and ultimately, enhance and improve. The open source nature of Superdesk makes it possible for all users to have the most updated tech tools and therefore leaves more resources for the news organisation to focus on actually making journalism.
Journalism for the greater good
“There's no point in doing journalism that doesn't benefit society.” - Anas Aremeyaw Anas, Ghanese investigative journalist.
I like to think that behind any news organisation in the world, from the biggest to the smallest, there is a noble motivation to contribute to social development. In Perugia, I have attended some incredible sessions with journalists that are an example of our work in supporting independent journalism. Their stories are testimonies of the important work there is still to do to enhance the work of journalists.
I’m proud of the part we do at Sourcefabric supporting projects of media development with our technology and training newsrooms to integrate new tools. Side note: we are about to announce the winners of our initiative!
These are the sessions* that you should definitely see:
- Anas Aremeyaw Anas, undercover reporter in Ghana
- The Red Web: the struggle between Russia’s digital dictators and the new online revolutionaries
- Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently: the courage of reporting on life in Syria under ISIS
*By the way, all the festival’s sessions were live streamed and are now available online.
This year, Sourcefabric was also involved in a panel on Automating verification: how far can we go? In this panel, together with Sam Dubberley (Eyewitness Media Hub), Jochen Spanderberg (Reveal Project, Deutsche Welle), Mark Stencel (Duke Reporters' Lab) and Jenni Sargent (First Draft News), Sourcefabric co-founder Douglas Arellanes shared our latest innovation project on image verification, Verified Pixel. Here there is also a short write-up of the session.
My favourite international journalism festival
While I was writing all this, I couldn’t help but think about what makes this my favourite international journalism meetup of the year.
I could tell you all about the incredibly accessible atmosphere of the festival, where all sessions are free and even the most renown speakers attend other sessions, queuing with the rest of the crowd to get their seat. I could tell you all about the many casual conversations about journalism I had with some of the smartest crowd in the industry over coffee or Aperol Spritz. I could tell you all about the incredible team of volunteers behind the scenes of the festival, making it possible. I could tell you all about the beautiful venues in the centre of medieval Perugia and many more things… but maybe the best is for me to tell you this: come and experience it. It’s quite difficult to express in words what an extraordinary experience this festival can be.
So my last takeaway? Make sure not to miss the next edition of the International Journalism Festival, already scheduled for 5-9 April 2017. See you at #IJF17!
Want to know more about the latest news in Sourcefabric? Don’t miss our monthly newsletter. Want to work with us on a project for media development? Reach out by email and we will get back to you.