KARACHI: “Be slow and right rather than being fast and wrong,” said American journalist Hannah Bloch of National Public Radio (NPR) during her keynote address on ‘Digital news and its challenges’ at a two-day National Media Conference organised by the Centre for Excellence in Journalism at the Institute of Business Administration’s (CEJ-IBA) city campus here on Thursday.

Remembering her Time magazine correspondent days of the 1990s and early 2000s in Pakistan, she said it was a time when besides Pakistan Television and Radio Pakistan the people here relied on newspapers and magazines for news. “Reading my stories they used to get in touch with me and thus I would be able to directly interact with my readership. I have also worked with many journalists here,” she said, adding that later she also did double duty as the bureau chief of CNN to create a kind of synergy of print and TV journalism, which was actually a prelude of things to come.

“In 2002, I only had a phone to make calls and I couldn’t even imagine then that I would be sending stories, pictures and videos to my editors from my phone one day. We have come to rely greatly on these gadgets now,” she said. “But journalists are nothing if their audience cannot trust their stories and we need to maintain the standards of truth in the fast-paced news departments.”

She said that in the West, there were so many contradictory statements coming out about a story and one did not know what to believe and what not to believe or what was real and what was not. There can be so many false stories floating around on social media as well. In order to deal with all that, Ms Bloch shared the NPR example where they are fact-checking in a fast and aggressive way. “We take care about the language we use. To not judge anyone and be fair, we do not use the word ‘lies’ for any story that may not be true. Instead we’ll call it untrue or not entirely correct,” she said.

“We are also constantly annotating President Trump’s tweets to provide the story behind the tweets to help our audience understand the context of the tweets. Also we are carrying out quick fact checks while running live to help our audience be as well informed as they can be,” said Ms Bloch.

“One area of enormous concern is headlines as we know that many people only skim through headlines without actually reading the story below. So we have to be careful about whether its wording is actually conveying the story,” she said. “Visual elements also play a role as many just look at the pictures or maps and graphs, so data journalism is also important.”

About social media, she said that there they could track the audience. “With print, we can only tell how big a readership we have from the subscriptions and copies sold. But with social media, we can tell the readers’ habits like which story on what page was read and how many times,” she said.

The ‘Future of digital news’ was also in focus during a panel discussion moderated by Amber Rahim Shamsi of DawnNews with Elisa Tinsley (ICFJ), Iqbal Baloch (Vsh News), Ovais Jafar (Geo News) and Hannah Bloch as the panellists.

“Changing technology is edging out the old journalist,” said Ms Shamsi.

“Half of the world’s population is continuously online through their smartphones,” said Iqbal Baloch.

“A reporter today better knows multimedia. If you can write, take pictures and make videos, fine. But if you are just a reporter, you will be replaced by somebody else,” said Mr Jafar.

“Training, especially technological training, is enormously important for the journalist to be integrated into his or her work,” said Elisa Tinsley.

Earlier, Faisal Sayani in conversation with veteran journalist Ghazi Salahuddin examined the evolving journalism and what pulled people into the profession. He said that when launching The News International he visited the Mass Communications Department at the University of Karachi. “You complain that you can’t find jobs and I complain that I can’t find journalists,” he said to them while encouraging them to apply to the paper by appearing for their test.

The conference offered an educational experience for some as it included training modules for practising journalists.

CEJ Director Kamal Siddiqi said the conference aimed to be both informative and educational. He said the CEJ aimed to help journalists adapt to the fast-changing environment.

Senior journalists M. Ziauddin, formerly of The Express Tribune and Dawn, and Zubeida Mustafa of Dawn were presented lifetime awards for their outstanding contribution to journalism in Pakistan.

The conference will conclude on Friday (today).

Published in Dawn, April 21st, 2017