Reclaiming Journalism for Readers – the Story of a Renaissance
Nadja Schnetzler |
TEDxZurich
• November 2017
Journalism, everywhere on the planet, is in bad shape. There are numerous things that threaten the one job journalism should have: Informing the electorate, the voters, in a democracy. Threats to journalism are totalitarian tendencies, commercialization, algorithms and, most importantly, that most large editing houses do not invest in journalism anymore, but in areas that are making money. Journalism has become largely a side product of being in business with the advertisers. But journalists should be in business with the readers.
The only way to solve this problem is to hack the system. Journalism must be responsible to the reader, and only to them. This means that the construction of a media company needs to think about journalism as well as business. This is a story of David and Goliath. The story of how people in Switzerland have said: Yes, good journalism needs to exist, and we, the people, need to pay for it.