Richard Sambrook: Transparency is the new objectivity, and the Internet is not your enemy

I came across this post by Mercedes Bunz in the Guardian about a talk given by Richard Sambrook at the Oxford Social Media Convention. Sambrook is the head of the BBC Global News Division.

On the impor­tance of objec­tiv­ity and transparency:

Objectivity, he then pointed out, had always been an idea impor­tant for the news. For him it was once designed to deliver jour­nal­ism that peo­ple can trust. But in the new media age trans­parency is what deliv­ers trust. He stressed that news today still has to be accu­rate and fair, but it is as impor­tant for the read­ers, lis­ten­ers and view­ers to see how the news is pro­duced, where the infor­ma­tion comes from, and how it works. The emer­gence of news is as impor­tant, as the deliv­er­ing of the news itself.

Then on the rela­tion­ship between Twitter and jour­nal­ism, and between jour­nal­ists and the Web in general:

You get a lot of things, when you open up Twitter in the morn­ing, but not jour­nal­ism. Journalism needs dis­ci­pline, analy­sis, expla­na­tion and con­text, he pointed out, and there­fore for him it is still a pro­fes­sion. The value that gets added with jour­nal­ism is judg­ment, analy­sis and expla­na­tion — and that makes the dif­fer­ence. So jour­nal­ism will stay — he was opti­mistic about that. However, jour­nal­ists must under­stand one rule: if you believe you are in com­pe­ti­tion with the inter­net, find your way out. Collaboration, open­ness and link cul­ture are rules, you can’t deny at the moment, he said.