• Vision
• Opportunity
• Impact
• Change

4GJ Impacts All Of Us

The world is changing. It’s interdependent. And so are we. We are beginning to understand ourselves as part of one global community. We have changing needs. Changing roles.  Changing responsibilities. The media is how we learn about and understand the world around us. It's time for the media to catch up. If it doesn't, the consequences will be dire.

Journalists

For journalists, change means reconsidering who they are, how they cover stories, how they handle their own prejudices and blind spots. It means more assertively questioning the publicity machines of governments, corporations and interest groups. It means going on the ground not to the press conference. It means developing a humbler voice – media does not know everything, and acknowledging that builds credibility. It means editors allowing stories from the ground to dominate stories from the White House; it means not telling journalists in the field where to focus their energies, but allowing them to report what they are seeing and learning. It means reporting not in the context of a press release, but what journalists find happening in the world around them. Perhaps most of all, change means respecting your audience, their intelligence, their curiosity and their need to understand.

Media Companies

For media companies, change means finding what you do well and building on that, knowing and understanding your audience. It means recognizing a new structure and shifting so that your feet are on stable ground within it. It means focusing on content and making it great while remaining flexible regarding delivery and platform so users can access it in ways that appeal to them. It means recognizing that you have a dramatically changed audience base that can be geographically or topically focused. But not likely both. It means not being afraid to lead. It means laying your chips down and doing your damned best. Change means recognizing that the days of 30% returns are something of the past.

Citizens

For citizens, change means seeing the opportunity to participate in shaping the future and grasping the responsibility to do so. It means connecting to human beings around the world who have shared concerns and choosing to solve those problems collaboratively – on both individual and governmental levels. It means understanding other people and their needs (and how those may be similar to yours, if differently expressed) and how their right to those ideas and beliefs are no different than your rights to yours. It means realizing that if someone tells you an issue is black and white, the truth is most likely a shade of grey. Change means feeling a sense of connectedness to the world around you. To humanity.

Society

For society, change means empowering the people to understand their individual responsibility and in democratic societies encouraging them to recognize and support the perspective of collaboration rather than competition. Hopefully, it can mean that it will be less likely for innocent human beings to be the victims of violence simply because there isn’t enough to eat or drink. Hopefully change can mean more understanding and less war.

Transforming The Media

The world is different. The threats are clear, present and global. They cut across communities, countries, languages, religions and cultures. They are transnational, and no one government can control them or protect its people from them. We are now one global community. And because media’s impact is no longer limited by geography or location it is time for it to resume its role as a public trust. A global public trust. The world is changing -- and fast. Media must change, too.

Copyright © 2009 | Transforming The Media