World News Day has grown since it began in 2018, and its message that “trusted journalism matters” aims to highlight the role of news providers in investigating and explaining important events.
It comes against a backdrop of what the recent Reuters Institute report described as “anxiety, disengagement, and cynicism” towards news among the public, “but also openness to new sources and formats, and continued belief in what news at its best can offer”.
Social media and video networks overtook news organisations’ own websites and apps as the main source of online news last year, but are trusted less, the report said.
In another report, published earlier this month, UK media regulator Ofcom, external also said people now get news from a wider variety of sources, with YouTube “growing rapidly” and 20% of people using AI tools to access news.
But growing choice has gone hand-in-hand with greater uncertainty about who and what to believe, and traditional providers are still seen as more trustworthy, accurate and impartial than online platforms, Ofcom said.
Brkic, who founded South Africa’s Daily Maverick, accepts that the media landscape has changed, and said established news organisations must respond.
“The old days are not coming back. We need to form a new equilibrium, and the only way we can do it is that if we actually join forces,” he said.
“If we continue like this, we’re just going to be weak individual players waiting to be taken out. If we don’t change something pretty fundamentally and pretty urgently, we’re just going to be roadkill.”
Brkic said the mainstream media has “committed mistakes”, but professional and reliable journalists play a vital role in society.
“We need to talk to our audiences and explain to them, it’s not in your interest not to choose truth and trust,” he said.
“We cannot function without a thing called the truth, without facts.”
The definition of “the truth” is often contested, however, as seen in US President Donald Trump’s long-running battle with what he labels the “fake news media”.
Brkic added: “This is the information-based society. We are the infrastructure for that information-based society. And that society is actually going to really struggle without us.”
