The importance of legacy media

In today’s world of information overload, it is estimated in 2016 that every second approximately 6,000 tweets were put out, more than 40,000 Google queries were searched, and more than two million emails were sent. In this deluge, how do we navigate through the minefields of lies, spins, and partial truths?

• There are principles such as first-hand knowledge, verification, bearing witness, and accountability that govern the flow of news. The term ‘fake news’ legitimises outright lies and and partial truths and cannot be linked with the word ‘news’ allowing the debate to be framed as a textual problem, while it is an ethical and social one. 
• The exponential growth in polarised websites and social media activism aimed at ruthless propaganda before elections and trying to invoke Article 19 to defend this act of criminality undermines democracy itself.
• In the complexity of information disorder, the words ‘fake’ or ‘news’ is woefully inadequate to capture this polluted information ecosystem.
• There is a discernible movement away from the constant blur of breaking news on television screens and social media platforms.
• In this environment, legacy media* is regaining its place as a credible information provider. Majority readers have started valuing the process of stringent gate-keeping that forms the bedrock of journalism. *Media such as radio, television, and especially newspapers are considered as legacy media where the receiver does not contribute or interact with the content and remains totally passive.
• The importance of slow journalism is that it takes time to do things properly with the values of journalism — context, analysis and expert opinion. They cut through the noise by not following modern news production methods that are filled to the brim with reprinted press releases, knee-jerk punditry, advertorial nonsense, and churnalism. Instead, they prefer slow journalism as an antidote to menace: Intelligent, curated, non-partisan news coverage designed to inspire and inform.

Being one of the last to break news can inform readers in a way that the constant stream of 24x7 news updates cannot. One of the best things about a print edition is the virtue of finite space. They don't fall into 24/7 news traps: the speculation, conjecture and hot air. It is up to the readers to support journalism and not fleeting social media trends.

We systematically overestimate the change that will occur in two years, 

while underestimating the change that will come in the next ten years ... Bill Gates