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As social media grows, journalists urged to bridge 'understanding gap'


With the public getting easier access to news and being able to spread them just as fast, journalists are facing an increasing challenge of helping people make sense of the news instead of merely reporting events, according to a veteran journalist and co-founder of a pioneering investigative reporting outfit in the country.

“We’re really in a very paradoxical age. When I was growing up, there were three newspapers and three TV networks,” said Sheila Coronel, a multi-awarded journalist who opposed the Marcos regime during Martial Law and went on to set up the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ).

“Now, your choices are infinite, but despite this greater access to data and information, it doesn’t necessarily translate to greater understanding, so there is no information gap, there is an understanding gap,” she observed. “Readers cannot make sense, the gap is the sense.”

Coronel, who will assume a new post as Dean of Academic Affairs at the Columbia Journalism School in New York next week, delivered a lecture during the 25th anniversary of the PCIJ at the Sulo Riviera Hotel in Quezon City last June 20.




Despite the advancement of technologies which made access to information and to communication a lot easier and faster, public understanding of current issues remains at a low level, she said.

“As the government has become more complex, the issues are more complex,” Coronel noted.

“So even more now, as we face the challenges brought about by new technology, we need more than ever to bridge the gap, we need more than ever the journalists who can help the public understand complex issues,” she added.

'Everyone is now a journalist'

Coronel pointed out the tough challenges posed by the internet and social media.

“We are now in the midst of a technological revolution. This revolution is a global one. This revolution consists of redefining what journalism is, who is a journalist, what a story is, how it can be told, what are the sources of information, and how the information can be disseminated,” Coronel said.

“News is now ubiquitous, it’s all around. You no longer have to wait until six in the evening to watch the newscast. It’s all around the web 24/7, and in social media, readers share. You don’t have to look at the site of the newspaper or the news network. They go to Facebook and see what interests them,” she pointed out.

She said the traditional roles of a journalist such as informing the public, verifying facts, putting context, witnessing, sense-making and acting as watchdog are now being done by non-professionals as well.

“Our competition is the audience. Everyone now is a journalist,” Coronel said.

She cited the storm chasers that were ahead of mainstream media in uploading on YouTube the first few videos of the onslaught of Typhoon Yolanda in November last year as one example of how news outfits “no longer have the monopoly of breaking the news.”

In Syria, most of the footage used by media agencies are from citizen journalists, protesters, and scholars from various international organizations who are on the ground, she said.

“Gwyneth Paltrow announced her break-up (with husband Chris Martin) on her blog, the death of Bin Laden was first announced on Twitter. They didn’t wait for journalists to break the news,” Coronel added, pointing out that social media has now become the “primary breakers of breaking news.”

She quoted a protester in Syria who asked: “We all use Twitter and we asked ourselves, do we really need microphones and place the name of the TV stations on them so that people would know what is happening?”

“The answer is no. Ordinary people can broadcast directly to the audience,” Coronel said. “All we need are tablets or iPhones to break the news.”

Hi-tech investigative reporting

In the journalism industry itself, power has shifted from traditional media (radio, television and print) to digital media, Coronel said.

For investigative reporters, new technologies are boosting their capability to ferret out information faster and present them to the public in more creative formats.

Coronel, who served as the executive director of PCIJ for 16 years since it was founded in 1989, recalled their investigation in 2001 on the ill-gotten wealth of former President and current Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada.

“We had to do stakeouts and look at the cars parked in front of Estrada’s properties. And then we have to manually trace the license numbers,” she recalled. “We couldn’t go near his house because the fences were so high, and the closest we’ve gone through was the MRT station in front of Wack-Wack, we tried to get an aerial photo of Estrada’s Wack-Wack Mansion.”

The investigation, which revealed that Estrada has 17 properties worth more than P2 billion, involved “painstaking documentation” and surveillance that helped ignite a revolt and eventually end his presidency.

In the current media environment, Coronel said it is easier to check on the lifestyle of controversial personalities as “people cannot help but post evidence of their lifestyles in social media.” She cited the Facebook and Twitter posts of Jean Napoles, the daughter of alleged pork scam mastermind Janet Lim-Napoles, that showed her extravagant lifestyle in the US.

Latest gadgets, such as drones, and computer applications can also help greatly with investigation. Coronel cited the story from a Burmese activist who was able to expose the secret mansion of a military general in Burma using Google Earth.

Unlike previous decades when PCIJ staff had to peruse hard copies of Estrada’s corporate records at the Securities and Exchange Commission, almost all government institutions are now digitizing their records, she added.

“Now we have the tools that allow us to be able to crunch large documents, to make sense and find patterns, and find stories in them. Document analysis has become easier,” Coronel said.

However, she stressed that despite the infinite things reporters can do on the internet, investigative journalists still have to verify the facts and do legwork to obtain crucial data.

“Hardcore reporting still needs to be done. What technology provides is a new tool to do more efficiently the gathering of sources, the farthest sources,” Coronel said.

She said the media can embark on new approaches of doing stories such as collaborative reporting, or working with organizations that specialize on specific topics.

Journalists could also present stories in a more visual way through tables and graphic information, or explore new forms of story-telling such as animation, drawings, and voice recording, she said.

Cyberlaws and press freedom

Despite this newly found wealth of information, however, Coronel said one of the paradoxes facing the journalism industry is that global press freedom has been regressing since 2012.

“We expect that with the openness of information in the internet, it would open up the media, that the freedom of information would get better, but it did not,” she said. “In the guise of cracking down on cybercrime, regimes around the world use cyber laws to restrict expression online.”

Just this year, the Philippines sank further in the “Global Press Freedom Index” released by the international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Of the 180 countries included in the list, the Philippines ranked 149th, two rungs lower than in 2013 and nine places lower than in the two previous years.

Coronel pointed out that while social media can help fuel mass action, the challenge for journalists is to present information that matters directly to people, and data that they can act on.

“It’s easier to mobilize by posting something. This is the same problem we’d had in 1986 and during Estrada—it’s easier to topple a government. It’s harder to rebuild a reformist, long-lasting government platform,” Coronel concluded. – YA, GMA News

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