How Local Journalism can upend ‘Fake news’ narrative.

Local journalism has been in dark shadows of the digital media. Earlier with immense respect for the decentralized news information point, local journalism was the key to reporting the intrinsic news and not the rigged ones. Now, with the growing popularity of application based news, journalists have primarily been engaged with sugar-coating the original version which can only be gathered by shop floor level journalists, and thus the reliability factor is diluting.

Today, we all read around 4000 to 5000 words everyday or even more, out of which nearly 2000 belong to the news data feeds, but have we ever thought as to what slice of it is genuine. Some years back it was a challenge to assimilate information or data, but today it’s about drawing conclusions with prudence. ‘Fake news’ or rumours spread like a wildfire and has catastrophic effects on its readers. Though digital media might have bought convenience and facilitated cross border mobility, but it has also very sensitive to false information. With the concept of decentralizing the power of words, all citizens are equipped with tools to be verbose about opinions, for example Twitter. ‘Freedom of speech’, a pillar to the constitutional right, has taken plethora of dimensions from digital to social media to mass protest. I was abashed by some data I recently came across, it showed that over the past half decade, the most successful political runs or social campaigns have all been rooted through the internet and a large pie was driven by public opinions.

We can rectify the ‘Fake news’ narrative by first decrypting the intention people or news groups have behind floating these epidemic data points. It is often to mislead the public to shield the truth, and make the whole story a sensation in all forms of media. Local journalism aids us with the first hand information on the intricacies.