The journalism profession who was scolded as a "chicken rib" was not wronged

Writing | Zhang Wenxi

Edit | Xiao Feng

Title map | The Journalist

In the face of internal and external difficulties, how should journalism respond? In the age of social networks, what should news do? Is reading the news really no longer a good choice?

The journalism profession has recently been on the cusp.

Zhang Xuefeng, a graduate school teacher, advised students not to apply for journalism in a live broadcast, saying that "closing your eyes and applying for a major at any time is better than journalism", which caused a huge controversy. While receiving the support of many netizens, a number of teachers from journalism and communication colleges and universities also posted articles to respond to and refute Zhang Xuefeng's doubts about the journalism major.

Is journalism still worth reading? There seems to be a lot of data and surveys to show that journalism majors are becoming more and more awkward, employment rates are unsatisfactory, and they frequently appear on the "college students' most regretted majors" rankings.

Recently, a report appeared on the hot search: "The survey of CNBC at the end of last year showed that 44% of college graduates among respondents regretted their chosen major. At the top of the list was journalism, with 87 percent of respondents saying they regretted choosing journalism when they were in college. ”

On the other hand, with the development of social networks in the past ten years, the form of media has undergone drastic changes, and the journalism profession has also experienced an internal crisis.

On June 14, 2023, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, UK, released its 2023 Digital Journalism Report. The report shows that younger generations are more likely to get their news through social media, search engines or mobile aggregation apps. Social media, where everyone can become a "journalist", has become an important entry point for users to get news.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence technology has begun to intervene in news production, and short videos of more than ten seconds try to find their place in the news map, and Internet big V has become a news source for young people. Many events are made public for the first time, not from the media, but from social networks, from self-media, from video accounts, and media reports are easily drowned in the flow of information.

"Newsroom" stills.

In the face of internal and external difficulties, how should journalism respond? Is reading the news really no longer a good choice?

Chang Jiang is one of the most popular journalism and communication scholars among young people in recent years. As a distinguished professor at Shenzhen University and director of the Media Convergence and International Communication Research Center of Shenzhen University, Chang Jiang has more than 1 million followers on Weibo. He continues to participate in public discussions on social media, more often sharing pictures of his daily life and food, and occasionally responding to questions from netizens in the comments section.

In recent years, "digital journalism" has become the focus of his research, and he cares about how the news industry will develop in the digital age, and what choices readers have in the face of the increasingly complex Internet and news sources. How would the self-described "deep social media user" of journalism and communication see the crisis of journalism?

The following is Professor Chang Jiang's answer.

01

Social networks facilitate dialogue and are just an illusion

Hardcore Book Club: After many news events, social media becomes a battleground for public opinion. Social media, ostensibly promoting openness, equality, and freedom, seems to have failed to bring people to communicate. The pink-haired girl was raped by the Internet, and the whole Internet attacked the girl who accused others of secretly filming... These are typical cases. Is it just a techno-optimist fantasy for social networks to promote dialogue and understanding between people?

Chang Jiang: Yes, it's really just a fantasy. And technological optimism seems wrong to me.

Social media can only facilitate dialogue, not understanding. Understanding does not arise in dialogue, but in "conversations with distance".

The concept of "distance" here is a complex concept that includes both the social and psychological alienation of the parties to the dialogue, as well as some principles that must be observed in the dialogue activities, such as openness and transparency. And these are things that the culture of social media is opposed to.

To make matters worse, the platform capitalism behind social media is somewhat fueled by violent discourse — more understanding means less traffic, and "conflict" is a bonanza for user data.

"Pinocchio" stills.

Hardcore book clubs: Social media is becoming more and more entertaining, like the current Weibo hot search, many of the top are celebrity entertainment gossip or trivial entertainment trivial matters, really serious public issues are sometimes difficult to get attention. What impact do you think this situation will have? How to raise people's attention to public issues on social platforms? What role should the platform play in this?

Chang Jiang: On this issue, I would like to emphasize two observations: First, all "hot searches" are generated by the intervention of platforms and even other forces, so what hot searches present to us and which issues are given higher priority is not a natural occurrence, but a deliberate one. If the platform wants to do something good, or has the ability to do something, then that's probably not the case now.

Second, most of the time people tend to pursue easy pleasure and avoid seriousness and heaviness, which is human nature. People's attention to serious public issues is the result of rationality and self-discipline, which means that if we expect people to pay more attention to "serious" issues, then what we need to do is to improve people's rationality and self-discipline, not change the hot search.

So, I still think that many things are not a matter of "circumvention" or "guidance". Improving the overall information ecology of a society is a systems project, and no single actor – whether platform, KOL, user or otherwise – can accomplish this task through unilateral efforts. What we need is a holistic mindset.

The question we need to consider is: what institutional or cultural design can allow platforms and users to willingly cede some interests or suppress part of their nature in exchange for a better society?

Washington Post stills.

Hardcore book club: Recently, the Reuters Institute for Journalism at the University of Oxford released the "2023 Digital News Report", which shows that the proportion of people viewing online news through social media (30%) is ahead of the apps and websites that directly visit news brands (22%), especially young people, who are more dependent on social media, and social media has become an important entry point for users to get news.

Do you think there is a trend in China where people tend to get news through social media? How will this change in the way news is obtained affect individuals?

Chang Jiang: The use of social media as the main channel for getting news is a general trend, which is not much different between China and European and American countries. A fundamental structural feature of the entire digital news ecosystem in the past 10 years has been platformization. In journalism, platforms are not very involved in news production, but they can set general rules for news circulation, determining how much visibility and cultural priority can be given to content of different types and topics.

For individuals, social media has become the primary way to receive news, implying a fundamental shift in the way information is acquired. As part of the platform's content ecosystem, the differences between news and other types of information will become more and more blurred, and many of the professional marks inherent in news (such as objectivity) will be constantly diluted.

In short, journalism will become more complex, difficult to discern and define than ever before. Over time, people's perception of social reality will depart from general standards, and society will enter a "post-truth" era in the true sense of the word—not that truth is no longer important, but that people increasingly feel that there can be many versions of the truth, and even that there is a "truth" that suits them best. In my opinion, this is a crisis of the entire epistemological system of society.

Among respondents, the percentage of respondents viewing online news via social media (30%) leads apps and websites that directly access news brands (22%). /Reuters Institute for Journalism, University of Oxford, Digital News Report 2023

Hardcore Book Club: Based on your observations, what age group is more likely to use social media as the primary source of news information?

Chang Jiang: We used to think that the people who received news through social media were mainly young users (and statistics may still support this judgment), but the general trend is that there are fewer and fewer differences in news reception habits between generations.

Of course, this does not mean that young people and middle-aged and elderly groups receive the same news, but that there is gradually no difference between them in the overall choice of channels. Different groups of people may use different types of tonal social media as their news channels, such as Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou and Weibo, and the demographics of core users may be very different.

But we need to see the general trend: social media is changing from "one medium" to "dominant media", and even showing the development trend of some kind of "all-round media".

02

When information channels are blocked,

Everyone will listen to it

Hardcore Book Club: You mentioned in an interview that media usage habits of different generations are converging and are "migrating" to mobile smart Internet terminals, but there are still huge differences between digital natives (post-90s, post-00s) and digital immigrants (post-60s, post-70s), which is not only reflected in "media use". So, apart from differences in media use, what else do they differ?

Chang Jiang: The relationship between people and media is not simply a relationship of use and use, but an intertwined relationship in which they nurture and shape each other until they become part of each other.

The differences between different digital generations are essentially differences in their basic life logic and way of thinking based on their respective media experiences. This is a process of mediation, not just a "use and satisfy" mechanism.

For example, as a post-80s generation, although I am also a deep social media user, I always believe that systematic reading and "complete" narratives are the most effective way to convey meaning, so I will form my own judgment: social short videos have good entertainment and communication functions, but they are not a qualified cultural product.

This is a deep-rooted thinking that my media experience has brought me, and the post-90s and post-00s may have completely different judgments.

This conceptual structure is not so easy to change – and certainly not necessary. The world we live in is supposed to be full of differences, and it would be horrible if we all thought and did the same.

Stills from "More Than Stopping".

Hardcore book clubs: Due to the lack of fact-checking links, news messages on social media are mixed, and fake news and rumors are common. It can be noted that many middle-aged and elderly people will listen to some fake news and fake news forwarded by WeChat groups and friend circles. How can this be reduced?

Chang Jiang: Empirical materials do not seem to prove this. I did a small study on Zhihu and Quora users, and found that young and middle-aged people aged 30-40 are more likely to believe those obviously outrageous conspiracy theories (such as the new crown vaccine is Microsoft's 5G chip), in which men are the majority.

Some "new" media that are good at creating and spreading fake news (such as Breitbart News Network) have a core user base that is by no means middle-aged and elderly. Several fake news "big Vs" I have followed have not looked aging in their fan base. It's easy to put labels, but most labels are stereotypes and don't actually hold up.

We form the impression that middle-aged and older people tend to believe fake news because the digital media environment is generally more conducive to young people's access to information, which is a typical survivorship bias.

I'm probably older than the "young man," so I'm more aware of the problem. The technical barriers to access or validate valuable information for older persons to obtain or validate their own access are very high, and they often lack the necessary social support to do the job.

For example, because working young people tend to be in more WeChat groups, and retired elderly people are in a much smaller group, the former must have more opportunities to cross-verify information than the latter.

For example, almost all platforms have their own unique expression rules and language habits, these new rules and "grammar" are often defined by young users, then when the elderly want to obtain information through these platforms, there will be a cognitive threshold, naturally more likely to become victims of fake news.

We must first recognize that older people are a vulnerable group in the technological development trend, or more fashionably, digital underclass. The key to addressing the problem of older people falling victim to fake news is to promote age and cultural inclusiveness in the overall media environment, rather than criticizing "partial listening and partial belief".

When access to information is blocked by structural forces, everyone is biased, including young people.

"Newsroom" stills.

Hardcore Book Club: Nowadays, many news stories have shorter headlines and sometimes use joking language, in your opinion, what factors might be influencing this?

Chang Jiang: In my opinion, this is a very bad situation in the field of journalism right now, a kind of professional aberration, and in some cases even serious ethical problems. I myself am against various types of title parties. Business innovation is a serious matter, and the vitality of journalism also lies in its seriousness. Unless you admit that what you're doing isn't news, it's something else, then you're happy.

The phenomenon of title party has existed as early as the portal period, of course, there are many reasons, such as the digital media ecology information is seriously redundant and overloaded, in this case, in order to compete for the audience's extremely limited attention, many communicators choose to use a variety of sensational ways to make headlines, including extremely strong tone, various homophonic memes, and even attract readers to click by making certain vulgar associations.

I think some traditional media have played a very bad role in this process – instead of resisting such self-deprecating "innovations", they have become leaders and leaders in it, which is really sad.

Hardcore book clubs: On social media, young people prefer to consume news content published by opinion leaders rather than journalists. However, the source of information for these opinion leaders is still traditional media. Why do young people prefer to get information from KOLs instead of reading traditional media?

Chang Jiang: This question actually contains two small questions: first, why do opinion leaders' speeches please young people; Second, why traditional media speech is not pleasing to young people. There are the persistence and changes of the entire journalism industry during the transition period, as well as the new communication habits formed by the youth group in the process of being embraced by digital media, so it is difficult to explain it in two words.

But I still want to make a point: for news media, getting the "favoritism" of young people is not necessarily a good thing, and journalism should seek a balance between the two development goals of "popularity" and "professionalism".

03

Mediums have limitations, and short videos are no exception

Hardcore book clubs: In addition to social media, the proportion of short videos as news sources is gradually increasing. In recent years, a kind of rhubarb subtitles and simple "interview" news short video has begun to sweep major short video platforms, and many domestic mainstream media have also begun to use this communication method. Such short videos are often poorly produced, short in duration, and the six elements of news are not complete, but they all have very bright communication data. Some people call this kind of short video news that doesn't have much newsworthiness "new yellow news", what do you think of this kind of short video news?

Chang Jiang: I still have the old view that whether an online content is news or not is not determined by its publisher, but should have authoritative and professional judgment. People use short videos as a source of information, which does not mean that short videos themselves are news.

At least in our country, there are very strict rules about who publishes content and who is qualified to publish news. In Europe and the United States, no one treats social short video content as news, so its sensational form and content is a problem of the overall tonality of the platform, not a problem of journalism.

Washington Post stills.

Hardcore Book Club: In an interview, you described the media ecology of short videos as democratized and flattened culture, arguing that such media "make many things that should not be flat and should not be fragmented flat and fragmented, and will allow us to understand the complex world in an overly simple way."

But it is undeniable that they do have a stronger effect on dissemination, lowering the threshold for public content. Many popular science news during the new crown epidemic period was released in the form of easy-to-understand short videos, which played a wide dissemination effect. Is it possible for us to avoid the negative effects of "short, flat and fast" media forms and embrace their positive effects? How can we do that, if possible?

"Pinocchio" stills.

Chang Jiang: I think we should clarify the logical relationship in this question. First, there is no necessary connection between what basic cultural characteristics a form of communication has and how people use it in specific contexts. The French Lumière brothers originally invented cinema as a serious medium for the truest record of life, but later cinema was transformed by Hollywood into the most powerful entertainment tool.

Second, "easy to understand" and "wide spread" are urgently needed for urgent science popularization work in public health crises, but they do not apply in all situations. Of course, we can explain how to wash our hands after sneezing in a short video of more than ten seconds in an "easy-to-understand" way, can we explain why the subprime mortgage crisis happened under the same conditions and circumstances? Impossible. If someone claims to have done this, that person is a liar nine times out of ten.

For short video, its nature, role and performance are not a simple "positive" and "negative" problem, what we want to analyze is what short video can do (technical availability) and whether people choose to use it (behavioral ethics) can form a balanced relationship.

In concrete practice, it may be possible to make a more detailed classification of different scenarios in which short videos are applied to active communication. What I can think of is that short videos may be more suitable for public welfare communication or communication to groups with low literacy rates due to their intuitive and emotional effects, and are especially suitable for topics that are more logically black and white (such as legal policy advocacy, health science popularization, etc.).

But I also want to emphasize that the vast majority of issues in this world, including the various complex social phenomena and laws that we need to face and deal with in our daily lives, are not black and white, and their understanding requires richer contextual information, which short videos cannot do. I'm not calling for people to reduce their use of short videos, but rather to see its finite nature as a medium.

04

The journalism profession needs to change, not be eliminated

Hardcore Book Club: How should the media respond to the changes in the way readers follow the news, get the news, and participate in public opinion in the era of social media? In the age of polarized and entertaining social media, what can the media do to counter these trends and replay or reshape the role of the media?

Chang Jiang: My answer is very clear and very fundamentalist journalism: the media, especially mainstream media and traditional institutional media, should cherish their cultural heritage formed in history, adhere to the professional belief of "quality first", rebuild the intellectual authority of journalism in the digital age, and make news once again the most important intermediary for mankind to understand the world and understand the truth.

In his discussion of cultural change and resistance, Gramsci put forward a very subtle slogan: "intellectual pessimism, volitional optimism." "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." I think it's perfectly suited to journalism that is under pressure to transform due to dramatic changes in historical conditions. Only by remaining intellectually pessimistic can we be fully vigilant; And only by insisting on optimism in will can we wait for a just verdict of history.

"Morning News" stills.

Hardcore Reading Club: At a time of various drastic changes in the journalism industry, how should journalism and communication schools adapt to the changes of the times? At present, the journalism and communication schools of some colleges and universities have begun to offer Python programming, data visualization and other courses. While adapting to the changes of the times, what kind of teaching content should we adhere to?

Chang Jiang: University education is not only vocational education, but also professional education, but also literacy education. A good teaching system should be able to cover the basic content of these three aspects. For those who want to work in the news and communication industry, journalism schools should provide basic skills training, including but not limited to basic journalism practice courses, and more cutting-edge content production technology courses.

At present, domestic journalism schools have generally not done enough in this regard. This is not entirely a matter of educational philosophy, but often it is also subject to the solidified structure of the university itself. For example, journalism schools should hire practitioners with extensive practical experience to teach business and technical courses, but this is often difficult to achieve due to the university's own employment "standards", because the most outstanding journalists probably do not have doctorates from prestigious schools.

Professional education refers to the fact that journalism and communication can provide people with a professional perspective, concept and spirit, including the definition and grasp of truth, how to pursue objectivity and balance, and how to maintain the balance of relations and the health of media ecology in the social information communication system, and so on. Even those who do not work in journalism can be educated by the professional culture of journalism and become experts in certain fields.

But I think it's more important that at a time when the Internet and digital media have become so deeply infiltrated into daily life, journalism schools should also undertake the mission of providing high-quality media literacy and information literacy education, so that all interested and needy people, not just those with career aspirations in journalism and communication, can understand how to scientifically and correctly deal with the information ecology.

The organic combination and coordination of occupation, professionalism and literacy define a good model of journalism and communication education.

Hardcore Reading Club: For a long time, journalism has had evaluations such as "no journalism" and "no industry barriers". Recently, Zhang Xuefeng, a graduate school teacher, even advised students not to apply for journalism in a live broadcast, saying that "it is better to close your eyes and report a major at random than journalism." Why are people so unoptimistic about journalism? What do you think of this type of view? How does journalism reflect its value in the current social and employment environment?

Chang Jiang: The controversy itself is not very meaningful, and the goal of both sides of the debate does not seem to be to make the truth clear. But the debate itself reflects a general mentality that is worth playing.

First of all, what criteria is our society using to judge people's choices of interest? To be more specific: if a person still loves a profession while fully understanding its relevant information and development prospects, can such an interest be respected by the general standards of society? When a profession is considered "not very useful," can we ignore its other values?

I think we should have full respect for personal choice, even if it is considered "useless" by many people. Education cannot be entirely utilitarian.

Stills from "More Than Stopping".

Second, there is the definition of "industry barriers". The value of an industry in society does not seem to be determined by how high its barriers are, but by its role in the healthy operation of society.

The irreplaceability of a good modern journalism in terms of a benign information ecology, social structure and the cultivation of mass literacy has been confirmed by history.

At this time, it makes no sense to discuss whether the threshold for journalism is high or not, and my basic view is that all disciplines, including journalism, especially the humanities and social sciences, are indispensable for the functioning of human society (otherwise they would not have happened), so they have the value of existence as a profession, as well as the rationality of being loved and chosen.

What we need to do is to continuously improve and innovate professional education according to the changes of the times and environment, rather than using an approximate social Darwinian view to imagine them as "survival of the fittest".

I support and encourage all students who love journalism to choose journalism as a major – it may not seem "useful" at the moment, but it is entirely possible that you and I, and many others, love it for the better.

Proofreader: Huang Siyun