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September 17, 2007
Paul Chadwick, the director of editorial policies at the ABC, has an op ed in The Age on the media needing to change. He quotes from a talk that Alan Rusbridger, editor of the London Guardian, gave to the annual conference of the Organisation of Newspaper Ombudsmen:
Journalism becomes a never-ending organic business of placing material in the public domain … Everything we do will be more contestable, more open to challenge and alternative interpretation … When we publish something that's wrong, is it better invisibly to mend it so that the mistake is removed from the permanent record, or is it more important to record or capture the fact of the untrue publication as well as the correction or clarification?These are enormous conceptual shifts in what we do.
The op-ed is an edited version of recent speech Chadwick gave to the Melbourne Press Club. He says that for those who came to journalistic maturity under the old, more opaque systems of self-regulation, the new transparency and accountability may be hard to adapt to.
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Will we get a new generation of journalists? Journalism will have to be taught differently. How much influence do the old school have on the way cadets learn their trade?
We seem to be in a period of creative destruction.