Overriding public interest is the sole justification for the use of surveillance as a method to source information in journalism, senior editors said here at a conference on Wednesday.
Addressing a roundtable at the 3rd Digital Media India meet hosted by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, South Asia, Krishna Prasad, Editor-in-Chief of Outlook , urged the media to stop the “self-flagellation” on the issue and wondered whether it was right when the government, the bureaucracy (as in the Radia tapes issue), the Army (during the Kargil war) or even retailers — who used CCTV footage — resorted to surveillance.
Whistleblowers’ messageThe big message from whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden was for journalism to adopt more aggressive means of sourcing information, he said.
Kalpesh Yagnik, National Editor, Dainik Bhaskar , said pursuit of truth and service of public interest overrode everything else in the practice of journalism.
K.N. Shanth Kumar, Editor of Prajavani , felt technology needed to be dealt with care as it was essentially a two-edged weapon — facilitating surveillance but also increasing the vulnerability of journalists to digital snooping.
Chairing the session, N. Ravi, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu , said while editorial decisions on how to use, or whether to use at all, any information sourced through surveillance had to be governed by the principle of public interest, practitioners of journalism needed to remind themselves that public interest did not denote just what the public is interested in, but represented the larger common good.
Earlier, in his keynote address, Michael Maness, Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation at the Knight Foundation, U.S., pointed to the speed of disruption occurring in the industry and wanted journalists to be aware that the article was no longer the end-product and that “the threads of their work were as important as the finished cloth.”
The new media experience also showed that for news publishers, social media that was based on telling stories and sharing them, could prove more valuable than search engines, though on social media it was often the case that compelling headlines trumped the brand itself, he said. The conference featured case studies and experience-sharing from international media companies such as VG, Norway, and Beritasatu Media Holdings, Indonesia, that publishes the Jakarta Globe .
