Reshaping Journalism to Focus on the Public Interest Again

And we conclude the COMNEWS 2023 conference with another set of keynotes, starting with a remote presentation by Verica Rupar on journalism, search engines, and the public interest. She begins by noting the considerable transformations driven by digital technologies over the past years, not least in journalism, since the emergence of the World Wide Web itself; this was first seen as providing a greater platform for non-elite participants, with search engines also offering more access to such a more diverse range of voices.

This has enabled journalists to adjust their information-seeking practices, but the ranking algorithms of search engines also introduce new biases and surface new elites – continuing the criticism of journalism as driven by elites, written by elites, and consumed by elites. But who should journalists actually listen to? In principle, journalism should serve the public interest; but its understanding of public interest often differs from the real thing.

Contemporary journalism is therefore often outdated and disconnected from the interests of ordinary people – if it doesn’t change, it will simply die. It must therefore work to better understand public interest and support community cohesion; this will justify its central role in society. But current mainstream journalism tends to focus on events rather than issues, personalities over policies, and conflict over deliberation. The very concept of the political is appropriated to service media conglomerates and commercial interests rather than citizens.

The shift to search engines has severely disrupted information-seeking processes, and created a deep distinction between public and commercial sources of content; the ranking of information by search engines is also informed by the linking practices of other Web pages, and this has restructured knowledge repositories based on popularity rather than quality or diversity. Search engines rarely provide minority news.

But who gets to speak in the news matters: journalism’s commitment to a diversity of voices is crucial for accurate, fair, and impartial reporting, and to promote public participation in the democratic process. While the digital world enables everyone to speak, it does not ensure that they are all receiving the same attention – and people on the margins of society often fall behind especially far. This distorts and compresses public debate.

The obesity of information, misinformation, and disinformation overwhelms meaningful public debate; journalism has a responsibility to protect the public good here, and must participate in the larger process of social inclusion and exclusion. Journalism has moved from the privileged position of reporting life to the even more privileged position of reporting life that matters, and this is turning persons into representatives of groups, and even forming and dissolving such groups through its reporting. People are now in the news only if they represent a wider societal group. How is this exacerbated further by technological developments?

Automation multiplies journalism’s shortcomings, in fact. Search engines have revolutionised the information gathering process, but have done so by making a shift from public institutions to the commercial domain. This mirrors the considerable shifts in journalistic processes and formats as a result of the telegraph, or of cable television; it has happened also with the emergence of social media as a critical tool in journalistic practices. News aggregation algorithms have done the same, but hand their selection processes over to automated systems, removing journalistic intervention.

This also intersects with the question of public good – a more universal and less complex idea than public interest. The notion of public good adopts the goal of serving the interests of humanity as a whole, rather than simply of specific groups in society. We should use the opportunities inherent in digital technologies to further enhance journalism’s ability to pursue public good; journalists’ positioning as experts in the processing of information has been fundamentally challenged – and the sooner they address this challenge, the better served society will be.