Journalism is rediscovering the value of quality – Trionfi
Barbara Trionfi is Executive Director of International Press Institute, (IPI), a global network of editors and media executives set up 70 years ago to promote quality, independent journalism and press freedom. She speaks to about the current state of jou
There is much talk about ‘good journalism’ these days. What does the IPI see as good journalism?
The IPI is one of the very few and probably the only global press freedom organization that I know that has as one of its core mandate the promotion of quality, good journalism.
Interestingly, if you look at the words of our founding fathers, they believe that the need to promote press freedom is a foundation for quality journalism.
So, what we do basically is to discuss at every IPI award congress as well many other events, together with our networks, editors and journalists we work with, and look at the obstacles to quality independent journalism.
Specifically sometimes, they can be related to typical press freedom challenges, legislation, harassment, and attacks on journalists in other situations. There is also economic pressure, lack of efforts by anybody who is funding the newspaper, anybody within government or the political elite to influence newspaper coverage and in a way that prevents the newspaper or news organization from carrying out its public functions-basically upholding what is in the public interest.
Do you see a lot of overlap between carrying out a public function and the business side of news? Do you see that threatening the industry?
Absolutely. We see that as closely, extremely closely linked. We believe that newspaper needs Sunday very strong business models which allow them to be independent. One member of IPI for many years was Peter Preston, who was Editor-in-Chief of the UK Guardian for many years and a leading voice of IPI. He said ‘As an editor whenever the newspaper was doing well, financially, I had a wonderful time as an editor, whenever the newspaper was going through difficult times, it was very tough for me as well.’ So, basically the financial viability of any news organization is what allows the news organization to be qualitatively relevant for the audience that it serves.
In the last couple of years ‘Reporters Without Borders’ has been very vocal about government involvement in the news industry. Where does the IPI stand on this?
IPI, similarly with RSF and in some cases jointly with RSF, is against any interference by government, so any type of legislation that goes beyond what is acceptable and leads to interferences in journalists’ ability to carry out their work independently. How do we define what is acceptable or what is not? There are international standards we look at and these are on one hand forged by international organizations, UN special rapporteurs, the African Union, they all have international standards on freedom of expression and press freedom, but also they are very much forged by our own network of editors and publishers.
To which extent does a piece of law criminalising hate speech something good and when does that become a threat to journalism ability to cover certain issues? Similarly for blasphemy laws. To which extent do we need to protect, through legislation, the right of religious communities and when does that become an obstacle to covering also what is going on within religious community in an accurate way and in the defence of the public interests? So that’s where IPI looks together with this community of members at drawing the lines. There are great areas certainly and these also depend on the realities we work in. Certainly there would be differences in country where there are conflicts, where the economic situation is more challenging and there are also differences and international standard relating to that. Absolutely, that’s a core area of our work and the credibility of our work is given by the people we work with.
So, whatever we propose is not only the solution proposed by somebody in the UN system that has said that but solution proposed by the community of editors and journalists of the IPI who come together from countries as diverse as India, Japan, USA, England or Nigeria, jointly identify the Daily Trust on right measure. That is, to which extent we allow the government to interfere, to which extent that is good to defend the rights of the people and what we do as news industry that is acted on the basis of strong architectural principles do we need the independence to take our own editorial decisions.
In the last two decades there are lot happenings in the media like data and digital journalism. Going forward, where do you see the industry?
I think it’s a wonderful time for journalism. It is a challenging and fun time, I think journalism is rediscovering the value of quality. For many years we felt that the rights a journalist were compared to the rights of any bloggers who is out there expressing an opinion. I think today is the time where certainly we do defend everybody’s rights to freedom of expression. As IPI, we focus on the needs of everybody doing journalism and those who consume journalism to understand what it is about and to value it as a core pillar of the democracies of the society we live in.
This is the time where I think we have rediscovered the need to have that public function, the need to talk to our audience [as an industry] about how we do our work and why we do it and why this is in their interest. We do explain that. We also have to make sure that we go in that direction.