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Every year on September 28, World News Day aims to help journalism better explain itself and engage a global audience in showing how accurate information can make life better.
Making a positive impact on someone’s life is the greatest gift a journalist can give. Maybe hearing someone’s voice for the first time, or addressing an injustice.
Those moments when news editors pick up the phone and hear a terrified voice saying, “I’m left with you, and I’ve got nowhere to go.” The last stop between hope and failure.
It’s a sacred covenant, as old as journalism itself, but the tone of our time will try to separate people from the newsroom. If those who seek to turn journalists into enemies succeed, people’s right to independent access to information will be lost. As we all know, a world where people turn a blind eye to facts is a dangerous world.
Amid a global pandemic, record audience numbers around the world have been recorded as readers, viewers and listeners ingested life-saving news and information. However, a growing minority use a derogatory term, the so-called “mainstream media” – as if being together in a fact-based environment is a bad thing.
This is because facts can sometimes be uncomfortable, and journalists have a great responsibility to correct them.
David Walmsley is editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and founder of World News Day. – The Globe and Mail
We know that since World News Day 2018 began, the challenges facing the industry have only grown. We may better understand commercial pressures and changing audience habits, but we still haven’t done enough to explain ourselves.
That meant newsroom jobs were cut. The methods of interpretation and how the facts are discovered have become as important as the facts themselves.
Those potential audience members consume most of their information in closed, fast-paced networks. Time and time again we see examples of small, active minorities just believing what they are told, often by powerful forces withholding something. Journalists are used as bait to attack disturbing truths. As a result, the industry must devote more time to reaching those who have established facts even if they do not have them.
There is a walled environment on the Internet that prevents the sharing of multiple ideas and opinions, facts and realities. Of the myriad challenges we all face, certainty is one of the least appealing traits.
Reaching more than 500 newsrooms, World News Day is a global initiative to increase media literacy and audience engagement. We provide examples of how journalists can improve their lives when they tell their stories. We showcase the efforts of small newsrooms because they represent the importance of community. We firmly believe that access to information is a human right and the foundation of all our work.
The speed of change and the dangers and risks in society sometimes seem to be moving in only one direction, leading to a global audience that is both exhausted and saturated with information. In extraordinary news developments, we can play a constructive role.
The convening power of independent journalism has never been more important, and sadly, with this high level of relevance, the risks and threats to journalists, your storytellers, have only increased. Polarization velocity, an 18th century term originally used to identify the characteristics of light in photography, makes consistency obsolete today. But as newsrooms around the world often say, we are all entitled to our opinion, but we are not entitled to our own facts.
War, economic uncertainty, the determination to roughen up intergenerational practices in our institutions are the changes the world faces. The best journalism is in the middle of it all, its role is not to stitch divisions but to understand and be transparent.
World News Day exists to help journalism better explain itself and engage a global audience in showing how accurate information can make life better.
US President Joe Biden was born closer to his own presidency than Abraham Lincoln. What this view shows is not the age of humanity, but the opportunities and progress achieved over the past century, and it urgently raises the question of where we are going from here.
David Walmsley is editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail and founder of World News Day.
You are free to publish this column in honor of World Press Day, September 28, with attribution to the author.
World News Day is a global newsroom event aimed at highlighting the value of news. It is organized by the World Editors’ Forum of the World Press Publishers Association (WAN-IFRA) in partnership with the Canadian Press Foundation.
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