Numbers over substance

It is understood that being a part of the process of disseminating knowledge encompasses a great deal of power. What is far less understood is that with great power, should come great accountability — something we tend to overlook. In recent times, old powerhouses of media have been shaken up and journalism is undergoing a period of reinvention, as boundaries continue to blur. ‘Influencers’, ‘audiences’ and ‘content’ are constantly evolving, but what hasn’t changed is everyone wanting a piece of the pie.

The aforementioned ‘pie’ is made up of bloggers, who are actually PR executives and also journalists. I understand that professions might not stay stagnant and may evolve to cater to changing cultural, market and media dynamics. Journalists can now double-up as ‘bloggers’ to share their work with a larger, albeit different audience, but PR professionals shouldn’t really be the ones disseminating information to the public. There are a couple of reasons that this is creating problems, not just for those involved, but also for those at the receiving end of the said information — the public.

When everybody is trying to do someone else’s job, who exactly is doing the job they are actually meant to do? A compromised work ethic means the area of handling media relations is generally pushed to juniors at PR firms, where there is relatively little mentoring or supervision, which means that those handling media relations sometimes don’t understand what their job entails. Badgering people with constant phone calls and spam emails, and making uninformed pitches to journalists and bloggers is the result. PR executives, who pitch stories, often don’t take out the time to fully understand the beat journalists cover or their style of writing before approaching them.

Being a blogger-cum-journalist means producing more in different mediums in a bid to capture a growing share of the public’s ever-divided attention. Doing more means that quite often, the quality of information being provided is compromised. Journalists today are often not trained or mentored the way they used to be and some don’t even have a college degree. It is expected of journalists that they maintain good relations with their sources and networks, but never befriend people they have to be critical of.

But this principle is being ignored all too often now. There has been a shift from honest journalism towards power-hungry media manipulation, a world in which the content itself is considered less important than the number of clicks or social media following an article or news item may be able to generate.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 7^th,  2015.