Wanda Cash: How “old” journalism fits into “new” journalism

As we move into a newer media terrain, and as the news industry faces fresh challenges on all sides, it’s critical that journalism—in whatever form it takes in the future—carry “all the critical DNA,” University of Texas journalism professor Wanda Cash told us during her lecture Wednesday.

That is, today’s “new” news needs to be infused with old-time elements, exemplified in Kovach and Rosentiel’s famous work: Journalism needs to make truth its first obligation, and citizens its first loyalty; it needs to emphasize verification of facts and independence from those covered; it needs to provide a forum for public critique and compromise, and it needs to speak truth to power. In essence, she argued, it should be thought of like a public utility, a civic asset accessible to everyone but beholden to no one individual.

But those fundamentals often remain ideals in a 24-hour news cycle that is becoming an “every-minute” news cycle online. The Internet, she said, is a “voracious beast” always aching for more, more, more, and with updates on the minute. (Gee, wasn’t feeding the newspaper beast on a daily basis hard enough?) The result has been that the scoop-or-die mentality—long a bane of newspapers and television—has metastasized in the online environment, such that, “In the rush to be first, we’ve forgotten how important it is to get it right.”

That has led to journalists losing sight of their roles and spending too much time on technical matters—or even trivial matters, such as whether you’re wearing the right shirt for that stand-up video for the Web. So, as this generation embarks on a new kind of journalism, it’s clear that the news paradigm is evolving … but does it retain the same DNA?

(Also worth mentioning: The most “controversial” point of the lecture was Cash’s assertion that “the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with information they need to be free and self-governing.” Sounds rather innocuous, right? Well, among critical and cultural scholars in our field, there are concerns that journalism is such an agent of power that it can hardly be trusted to provide the right kind of information. Or, as I might argue another way, can we say that “old” journalism ever really achieved that aim? Haven’t certain traditional elements—most notably “objectivity”—sown the seeds for the present journalism’s lost-in-the-wilderness struggle to retain credibility and public trust?)