Of the dozens of assertions in a wide-ranging “manifesto” about the altered state of journalism from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, this one stands out:
Journalists are not merely purveyors of facts.
The authors can foresee a world where 90 percent of news reports are written by computer algorithms that convert data into narrative structures and where many newsworthy events are first described by connected citizens rather than journalists.
The result:
The journalist has not been replaced but displaced, moved higher up the editorial chain from the production of initial observations to a role that emphasizes verification and interpretation.
Working between the crowd and the algorithm in the information ecosystem is where a journalist is able to have most effect, by serving as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller.
Read more here
