Media literacy in the digital age

As a journalist, I often get asked whether the proliferation of news sources online (newspapers’ websites, blogs, aggregators…)  is indeed harming journalism. It will certainly take a while for news organizations to figure out a new business model and for other structures to be put in place to create a balance between traditional reporting, citizen journalism and commentary, and the economic crisis hasn’t helped. Over the next couple of years there will be less reporting done, fewer articles written, fewer important issues covered, but in the long term, I’m convinced that journalism, however different it might become, will thrive again.

What has to change, however, is our attitude toward the different sources that feed us information. In the old age of broadcast and print journalism, it was easy to remain passive and take for granted what we heard or read, because these institutions built their credibility on a history of highly-regulated and structured reporting. But now that we are overwhelmed by the amount of information we’re receiving, we’re going to have to be much smarter at sorting this information out and take from it what we need.

“In 2009 literacy isn’t about finishing a book or slogging through 12 web pages to get to the end of an article. It is about knowing what to do with information, how to find the good stuff, how to assess sources. What matters is not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers,” writes Utne Reader’s librarian Danielle Maestretti in the magazine’s July-August 2009 issue.

Whereas the journalism industry will probably regulate itself naturally, media literacy cannot be achieved without effort and education.