Panel Report: Quo Vadis Journalism?

Panel Name: Quo Vadis Journalism?

Chair: Epp Lauk, University of Jyväskylä

Speakers:

Ján Višňovský, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Slovak Republic

Barbi Pilvre, Tallinn University, Estonia

Adam Zbiejczuk, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Quo vadis journalism? As the phenomenon of new media spread around the world, traditional journalism needs to take steps to deal with the situation. The first speaker Ján Višňovský in his paper Transformation of the journalistic profile exams the transformation of Slovak newspapers in recent years. „In overall we can say that the number of sold copies of daily newspapers decline,“ stated Višňovský. It is caused mainly by economic problems, competition of TV and internet and by increase by information supply by social networks. Speaker also stated that readers no longer look just for the information, but they also want analysis and interpretation. Also there increase in demand for the information useful in daily life especially by young people who are not interested in politics or foreign affairs. „Despite the decline in readership of newspapers I hope that newspapers will survive next decades and will be able to keep up with the internet,“ ended Višňovský.

Next speaker, Barbi Pilvre, focused on the issue of gender in Estonia in the context of tabloization. Generally speaking, tabloization brings women´s issues (or private issues) to  main media and gives them more visibility. This also reflects the increasing activity of women in public sphere and their depart from belonging only to private sphere.  „In Estonian public broadcasting company ETV about 30% of persons appearing on the screen are women,“ claimed Pilvre. As a conclusion she stated that despite the increase in number of women who appeared in media, the position of women in society haven´t changed at all. Also the media use women´s stories to emphasize the extraordinarity of woman in men ´s area and use women ´s stories as soft stories or portraits. On the other hand, man can be characters of article focused on certain issue or political issue.

Adam Zbiejczuk, last speaker in panel, covered social media monitoring in his paper. „The main question is, why we should take social media seriously. It is because the usage of social media becomes the norm,” he stated. Also he compared the issue of social media to issue of cell phones or internet ten years ago. “Everybody said that they don´t need internet or cell phone. But look at these people now. Everyone has internet. Everyone uses cell phone,” he continues. Therefore the monitoring of social media is also important. But there are a lot of problems connected especially with monitoring the Facebook. It is really difficult to search the Facebook, also there the languages problems (especially with diacritics). On the other searching on Twitter is not as difficult as on Facebook due to searching engine and archive. Also there is possibility to search through discussions at news servers, but these are usually full of crap.  Next valuable source for opinions and preferences are discussions servers. Main problems with monitoring media is that people are obsessed with graphs, but graphs don ´t show all the preferences and important data. With the appearance of social media comes also the new type of journalism – crowdsourcing. Journalists use the social networks in search for information. “One example of this new feature and I think one, which will become more and more used, is that in Britain, data from normal people help journalists with tracking the money of members of Parliament,” ended Zbiejczuk.