I am an old journalist. In college, I joined the staff of our student publication in my first year. I was there primarily for the experience because the position did not offer anything else but prestige. But I did get a high grade because a teacher in my liberal arts class mistakenly thought I was a scholar and was maintaining a, yes, high grade.
There was no social media then. So my “exploits” in the academic sphere were never talked about. And I always hoped I’d land in traditional media after I befriended at least two former staff members of a student publication who were already editors of news publications in Cebu City. That trajectory would have changed had social media been around at that time.
Many of the things I learned when I was a journalist I learned on my own. I have always been a self-study practitioner and local journalists were not subjected to training before becoming journalists. But media training did become a thing for journalists in some local publications later on. Writing, after all, is different from broadcasting. But I remember training in my early years with the Broadcast Production and Training Center or BPTC, which was funded by a German foundation. But its reach was limited.
I am talking about this because many things have changed with the advent of social media. I am actually frustrated sometimes because many of the things we learned as professional journalists got drowned by the democratizing effect of social media. Nowadays, getting clicks has become more important than spreading genuine information. Half-truths and lies to generate false interest sometimes become the order of the day.
The other strategy to generate clicks is to intentionally not name in the headline a subject of the information to entice social media users to click to the “story,” which is sometimes not even much. The headline writer may try to be intentionally vague by saying that a “lawmaker has been arrested.” Of course, lawmaker can refer to a member of the House of Representatives or a senator. The vagueness does not matter as long as the story generates clicks.
Some members of traditional media have gone into social media but are instead “eaten” by the prevailing social media setup. Some journalists are not leading the way but have become mere followers of popular social media creators. I like the introduction of fact checkers like Vera Files but these fact checkers should start asserting themselves especially now that fake news and the lack of ethical standards are dominating social media.
There are actually two things I like with the tradition practiced by the old media. The first is adherence to the truth. For decades, the effort by traditional media in this regard has been exemplary, especially guided by the owners and monitored by the government. The second is adherence to ethical standards. Ethics is something that is sometimes foreign to social media where creators are more enamored with money than anything else.