4 challenges of journalism to face the flow of the social media

The technological revolution and social networks have changed the concept of news. This is the opinion of Hernandez Alvarez, Director of BBC Mundo, who asked: do people care if the information comes from a renowned newspaper or a friend in Facebook? 

To answer that and other questions regarding the challenges of journalists, for the first time the Fundación Gabriel García Márquez para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation for the New Ibero-American Journalism) and CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, brought together 13 directors of agencies and global media dedicated to cover Latin America during an activity prior to the Annual Inter-American Dialogue, in Washington D.C. 

The directors agreed that information is in the hands of everybody and it is no longer the exclusivity of traditional journalistic channels, which implies four challenges for journalists: listen to the networks, participate in that conversation, check the information that emerges in the networks, and place it in context.  

1. Listen. If previously editors waited for mail with the opinions of readers regarding articles published days or weeks before, today readers answer, respond, and criticize a news item the minute it is published in the Internet. The journalistic world was not prone to listen, and it selected the reader letters to publish and respond. The scenario has changed, and today people influence other people, leaving journalism a little on the side. It is necessary to understand how to participate in that conversation. 
    
2. Participate. For Boris Muñoz, Chief of the editorial section at The New York Times en Español, journalists will find the path to follow by participating in the conversation on the social networks. "Participating in those conversations helps journalists incline their ears to what the population is expecting, be it as an opinion, wish, expectation, or need".  
    
3. Check. Gustau Alegret, from NTN24, highlighted that journalism lives a paradoxical moment, when people have the most amount of information is when they seek for references that say 'that is true' or 'that is not true'. Being able to share and multiply the reach of a news item or a lie in the networks is invaluable; "Journalism has to work harder", but it has to be done. Alejandro Varela, from EFE, complements that idea: "an internet user may give a point of view or repeat a fact, but "the contextualization, ethics, and research work is not carried out by the citizens that state their opinions on Twitter or Facebook; that is done by journalists".  
    
4. Contextualize. The Director of the periodical Semana, Alejandro Santos stated that as a result of the amount of information that reaches us from the Internet, it is the journalist, with his/her sources and repertoire, who must contextualize a news item, explain its importance, and foresee the consequences. For Eduardo Castillo, form Associated Press, that is the key for many journalists from agencies and newspapers to reinvent themselves. "we must change from a descriptive journalism to an explanatory journalism".