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Last month, Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin launched the Journalism 2050 podcast as part of a CJR special issue on the monumental shifts in journalism that have brought us to this very uncertain moment, and where we might all be headed in the next twenty-five years.
Bell is the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and Chaplin is the director of Journalism + Design at the New School. Together, they talk with the smartest minds in media, including, in episode one, Douglas Rushkoff: an author, media critic, and futurist (though he prefers “presentist” these days) who has chronicled Silicon Valley’s effects on culture and communications since the nineties. Bell and Chaplin ask Rushkoff about what lessons we can draw from the anarchic free-spirited origins of Web publishing that can be applied to our present moment of techno-authoritarianism and Silicon Valley dominance. He foresees the emergence of a stratified media ecosystem, with a number of large global players and a vibrant network of smaller local and niche outlets. (If the media exists at all, that is.)
The Journalism 2050 podcast’s second episode was recorded before a live audience in the CJR office. In it, Bell and Chaplin are joined by Azmat Khan, the director of Columbia’s Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism, and Anya Schiffrin, a professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, to discuss the consequences of the war on Gaza for journalism. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it took only ten weeks at the end of 2022 for Israel to kill more journalists in Gaza than had previously been killed in any one country over an entire year, and the attacks have not relented in the three years since. These attacks, and the limp response from the US and other powerful countries, set a dangerous precedent for the future. Khan and Schiffrin discuss how journalists and media organizations can take the defense of their principles and values into their own hands.
The third episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast features Natalia Antelava, who cofounded Coda Story in early 2016 to cover democratic backsliding around the globe. Antelava talks about the naïveté with which news organizations treated the likes of Google and Facebook in the early years of the internet. To secure journalism’s future, she warns, there must never be such innocence again: “We got into bed with the wrong guys, and we got ourselves in big trouble.”
In our fourth episode, Ben Smith, the cofounder and editor in chief of Semafor, relives the early promise of blogging and social media for journalists. He talks about his original discovery, while at BuzzFeed, of the unsettling link between divisiveness and engagement, and what techno-evangelism means for the future of journalism.
The Journalism 2050 podcast’s newest episode, out today, features Jay Rosen, the media scholar. Rosen recounts how the internet, once thought to hail a new age of democratization in journalism, became a tool for corporate surveillance and for the centralization of wealth.
The Journalism 2050 podcast will resume later next month. You can watch or listen to the first five episodes wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
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