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In a world with shrinking newsrooms, fake news, workplace threats, and growing distrust in the media, it can be difficult for a journalist to do their job. Some people have even argued that artificial intelligence could make journalists obsolete as the technology becomes more capable.
However, for veteran journalist and educator Alex Wake, the opposite is true. The existence of these conditions, particularly the blurred lines between fact and fiction, make journalism even more important for uncovering untruths.
In this edition of the Featured Leader series, Comms Room caught up with Alexandra Wake, president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia.
Wake is currently an Associate Professor at the RMIT University. Before that, she earned her stripes as a reporter for three decades, most notably as a reporter and news editor for ABC for almost 24 years.
Wake shares her insights on some of the most pressing issues facing journalists today and why now more than ever, journalists need to be able to do their job to the best of their abilities.
Here is a transcript of our interview, lightly edited for brevity.
Comms Room: Besides being an educator and journalist, you also lead the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). What are some of the most pressing issues that JERAA is working on today?
Wake: The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) is a peak body for journalism research both here in Australia and also New Zealand and across the Pacific. We advocate for a number of issues to improve the training and education of journalists in the university and higher education sectors. We also promote press freedom. We advocate for all issues around journalism where we can.
We’re quite often talking to government about definitions of who is a journalist or looking at particular laws that may impede on the work of a journalist. All aspects of journalism, really.
Today we are talking about racism and journalists who are particularly targeted because of their racial identity. In Australia today, there’s a lot of publicity around Stan Grant who is one of the most prominent and experienced indigenous journalists. And he has stepped away from the role of presenting the current affairs program Q+A.
So today we are talking to the media about that, I’ve done a number of interviews and just tried to share resources. There was a recent report done by Media Diversity Australia about the impact of racism on journalists in this country. We’ve specifically pointed out that it’s not something that individual journalists need to be responsible for, that it’s a workplace, health, and safety issue, and that organisations need to be held responsible for keeping their journalists safe.
That’s a big part of my job today has been doing that. The other part today has been on actually defining who is a journalist in 2023. So last week, I was in court with a couple of other academics actually talking about who should be defined as a journalist. Whether or not it was someone who could live stream and said they were a journalist or whether or not they needed to have something more than that to do the role.
We were arguing that you need to have more than a mobile phone and a streaming service to be a journalist. Always every day, there’s something interesting and new coming up. Those are the two ones for today.
Comms Room: You worked as a journalist for 23 years. How has journalism changed over the years?
Wake: I literally started as a journalist back when we had typewriters and telephones and telex machines. I think the biggest change has been the internet. I remember I took a couple of years away from journalism and then came back to it. I sat down in the newsroom, and I just remember being struck by, it didn’t matter what question I asked in the newsroom, someone would answer, ‘just Google that.’
I was just like, wow. When I had previously worked in newsrooms, if you had a question, either you were sat beside someone who knew everything, and there are a lot of very talented and clever people in newsrooms. Or they would send you to a library or a reference book or something along those lines.
But the internet has changed everything. And it’s not just being able to access information quite quickly online. Although to be fair about that, that’s contemporary information. You know, a lot of historical documents aren’t online.
So, there’s the information access, but also all the apps and all the editing, I mean I learned to radio edit back when you literally had to cut and splice tape. That’s all digital now, they don’t even understand that that was a physical process once.
And even the mobile phones, which certainly didn’t exist when I started reporting. Mobile phones were only something that the office would give to you because it was so expensive. And now, everyone’s got a smartphone that can do absolutely everything, and you don’t need to be in an office at all and you can be working at home. So, lots of technical changes across the board.
Comms Room: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that journalists are facing today?
Wake: It’s the ability of people to use AI and to be tricked and fooled into deepfakes. Because everyone can create something online and there’s a lot of very easy-to-use tools that can create and manipulate images and words and sound and voices. And you don’t always know about the truth of what you’re getting online now.
I think the biggest challenge for journalists right now is to ensure that what they create is actually known as their work and in some way, we can stop it from being manipulated so that original material, that truthful and responsible journalism that is produced by journalists around the world can actually be named as their work, and not changed. I feel that that’s something that really needs to happen.
Comms Room: How will ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools affect journalism?
Wake: I don’t think that they’re gonna affect journalism but I do think that they are gonna affect content creation. Because ChatGPT can create content faster than you and I can even think about it. If you ask it what to write it’s certainly faster at writing, you know, a polite email than I will ever be.
It certainly can write the 10 best coffee shops in Melbourne quite quickly. But what it can’t do is tell you information that isn’t already on the internet. It can’t tell you the information that people want to hide from you.
There will always be powerful people in this world that want to hide information from journalists and from the public. And that will increasingly be the journalist’s job to find that information and it to the fore.
Because there’s lots of people, as I say, who can use those tools to hide, to change, to spin information for powerful people for their own purposes. And that’s what journalists are gonna have to concentrate on ensuring that it doesn’t happen, that the truth gets out there.
Comms Room: One disturbing trend that we’ve seen globally are the shrinking or downright shuttering of newsrooms. What’s causing this?
Wake: One of the biggest problems is how that kind of news is being paid for. The problem we have at the moment is because there is so much information out there that people don’t see the need to pay for it. But if you want quality information, you need to pay for that information. And right now, young people in particular aren’t paying for good quality information.
There’s a couple of things we need to do, but I think first and foremost, is to ensure that in our education system, that young people understand that media literacy and access to quality information through journalism and other sources is as much a human right as food and water. You cannot make decisions about your life unless you have access to quality information.
You’ll always be able to find free information online that’s the top 10 Kardashian outfits and where to find noodles from big suppliers. But you won’t get quality information that you need to make decisions about your life unless you’re paying for that information.
We need to get young people paying for it. Older people already do pay for it, we need to get younger people paying for it and appreciating the value of that information.
Comms Room: Speaking of paying for news, was the news bargaining code a step in the right direction?
Wake: It’s getting the big platforms to pay, but I don’t think ultimately that that’s going to be enough. Google and Facebook, or Meta as it is now called, will find a way around that eventually. It’s working for a short time, and it’s not being particularly equitable. The money has gone to the bigger news outlets rather than the smaller ones. I mean it’s good, don’t get me wrong. I’m quite supportive of it but I don’t think that it’s the ultimate end of where we’re going to be, and certainly more needs to be done.
Related: Country Press Australia members can collectively bargain with Google and Facebook
Comms Room: What advice can you give to journalists navigating these challenges today?
Alex: The challenges are the same as they’ve always been. A journalist has always had to change with the technology. You’ve got to love and embrace technology. You can’t just think that technology is going to stay the same. Embrace everything that comes, all of the technological innovations that come. Some of them will make your life easier, some will make your life harder. You need to know how to use them and not be afraid of them. Give everything a go.
Remember that the point of a journalist is to find out information that someone wants to keep from you. You need to continue to be curious, to not always look in your smartphone but to look up and look around at the world and to ask those questions. Why is that happening, or why am I being told that information. You’ve got to figure out who it is that’s telling you something and why are they telling it to you. Always keep that skeptical mind and if you can do that, you can be a great journalist.
