World News Day, celebrated on Sept 28, is a global awareness day aimed at recognising the importance of fact-based journalism and its essential role in our daily lives.
The event is organised by the World Editors Forum and The Canadian Journalism Foundation. For 2024, the theme is Choose Truth, a campaign designed by Daily Maverick’s Project Kontinuum.
Twentytwo13 is supporting World News Day by featuring articles written by journalists worldwide.
This piece is by Marcelo Rech, President of the Brazilian Newspaper Association.
Have you ever reflected on why certain content grabs your attention, whether journalistic or entertainment? What draws you in, what pushes you away, and why?
These questions relate to one of the most valuable commodities of our time: time itself. Technology can advance indefinitely with artificial intelligence, 5G, or 1000 Mbps of internet, but there’s a fixed reality – there are only 24 hours in a day. So, it makes sense to spend time on something that adds value to your life and society.
These reflections are crucial for the future. It’s not just about separating truth from lies or reality from fantasy, but what they mean in practical terms for us: democracies versus autocracies, populism versus honesty, stability versus discord.
The press may not have all the answers, but imagine a world without it. Who would verify facts from rumours? How could you trust institutions if there were no credible and independent journalistic coverage?
Who would report new cyber scams where people lose their savings? Who would expose corruption when governments are slow or negligent? Who would highlight the dangers of Big Tech or the threat corrupt autocrats pose to democracies?
In this age of information overload, the question we should ask ourselves is, how are we spending our time? Are we avoiding the traps of over-engaging with tech platforms? Are we protecting our curiosity from being wasted on irrelevant content?
Independent journalism isn’t immune to challenges, especially sustainability. Most serious media organisations rely on a business model that suffers from the regulatory imbalance caused by tech platforms. No serious organisation can abandon ethics or compromise on truth, unlike Big Tech.
An analogy can be made between Big Tech and global warming. As a side effect of their business model, tech giants create social pollution that harms mental health and global stability. It’s only fair that these platforms pay a ‘support fee’ to professional journalism, which helps clean up this pollution.
The logic is simple: those who dirty the ecosystem should contribute to those who clean it. Big Tech’s greatest contribution to the future could be funding diverse, robust, and independent journalism, preventing humanity from marching towards disaster.
This column was written to mark World News Day on Sept 28, a campaign to highlight the importance of journalism and the need to support it.
