World News Day, celebrated on Sept 28, is a global public awareness day, led by a campaign to recognise and acknowledge the value and importance of fact-based journalism, and the essential role it plays in our daily lives.
The event is organised by the World Editors Forum and The Canadian Journalism Foundation. For 2024, the organisers are presenting a campaign titled Choose Truth, conceived and designed by Daily Maverick’s Project Kontinuum.
Twentytwo13 is supporting World News Day by featuring articles written by journalists from around the world.
The article below is by David Walmsley, Editor-in-Chief of The Globe and Mail, Canada, and creator of World News Day.
A record number of newsrooms have signed up for World News Day 2024, recognising the positive influence of journalism around the world.
More than 600 newsrooms and media associations across all continents have joined to raise awareness of the purpose of journalism, a profession that is under constant attack.
It’s a day to pause and reflect on the importance of independent and often brave journalists who make a difference in their communities and countries by providing the proof that leads to the truth.
Too often, those who shout the loudest on social media appear to be the newsmakers of the day, overshadowing the professional reporters and editors who are trained and determined to stand behind everything they publish.
Responsible journalism is a tough business when done properly. It necessarily confronts the easy, repetitive, and instant swirl of polemicists and propagandists determined to derail life to fit agendas that are often based on uncertainty and exclusion.
Photographing events as they happen, reporting the facts, beginning with incomplete information and building a more complete file over time, and ultimately ensuring, in the final edit, that the facts are prised out and placed squarely into the public discourse, is the business of mainstream media. It is inefficient, yet a timeless tradition without parallel.
Professionals fight back against the hackneyed idea that belonging to the mainstream is somehow inferior to being extreme.
World News Day is a day of awareness, to better explain journalism to the public at large.
It is also a moment to provide space for our audiences and highlight how their interactions with a journalist improved their lives. How, perhaps, they were finally listened to.
Or to reflect on the contributions of a local newspaper to the body politic, or the cost of liberty for a reporter detained for no reason – other than that she could be – by those with armies at their disposal.
Amid the growing coarseness of public debate, the pride of independent journalism stands as a source of optimism and belief.
Often at significant personal cost, whistleblowers entrust journalists with secrets. Businesses, politicians, and others in power increasingly refuse to meet reporters or explain themselves – but that doesn’t mean they are unaccountable. The rot is still exposed by individuals.
This past year, I met a source determined to get the truth out, but the conversations took place in a hot tub to prove I was not wearing a listening device, and, on another occasion, in my underwear for the final interview. The story was worth it all, but I couldn’t have known that at the start of the four-month odyssey.
That’s the romance of the business that recruits and rewards the indefatigable.
Interest groups, laden with bias, threaten economic punishment: “I’ll cancel my subscription” or “we’ll pull our advertising.” Perhaps next year, we will list those people who act in such a way.
So far, news organisations take the hit and don’t make it public. But it is all an attempt to interfere with editorial independence, and it is wrong.
Attacks on journalists – including murder – are at record highs. Journalism was not created for the messenger to be shot. But, while you can kill the journalist, you can’t kill the story. Others will take it on. Look at journalists in Mexico or Iran if you haven’t received your daily dose of inspiration. The rate of impunity for killing journalists, with no arrests made, creeps toward 100 per cent in some countries, but still the stories mount up.
A great miracle exists in the business of journalism: facts are not suppressible.
Those in need understand this. And it is those least in need who fight us most: the powerful, terrified their world can’t be entirely controlled.
That’s the magic of World News Day.
As you talk to friends and consider your community, village, town or the wider world, think about what you have learned today. There’s a fair chance journalism was involved. The storytellers, who come from your community, tell the facts, no matter how uncomfortable that can be.
That is why, unarmed and living in your community, they are targeted, hassled, belittled, and threatened. And it is why they respond with more facts, more answers, more independence of thought – and maintain the link between you and the wider world.
Journalists are a bridge as we build the future, supported by the capstone of our audience, who are as loyal and determined as the reporter and editor.
Together, on World News Day, if it feels at times that the vestiges of hope are falling away, remember the safety net of journalism is there.
