dou fengchang: today more than ever, we need to do in-depth reporting
2024-09-25
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author:dou fengchang (professor of school of journalism, fudan university, academic advisor of this journal)
source:wechat public account of "young journalists magazine"
introduction:
as long as we can keep pace with the times, we will find that what has changed in-depth reporting are only the organizational methods, production methods and presentation methods. after adapting to the new communication conditions, in-depth reporting can be "reborn from the ashes."
on august 16, the wechat public account "zhenguan" published an article titled "a girl from another place died in my rented apartment," which attracted great attention. on august 18, "zhenguan" deleted the article and published an "article handling instructions," but said the article was "a true event." on august 19, "zhenguan" published a "related instructions," and the account has not been updated since then. on september 4, netizens discovered that "zhenguan" had stopped using it.
the main reason why the incident ended like this is that "zhenguan", as a "self-media" account, did not fulfill its audit responsibilities. although "zhenguan" emphasized that the manuscript came from submissions and that it had done necessary audits on the authenticity, there were still some inaccuracies in the manuscript. for example, on august 20, a red star news reporter went to the deceased's hometown to investigate and learned that the deceased was a junior college student who graduated from a "non-211 university"; the ashes of the deceased were scattered into the river according to local customs, and were not thrown away; the local official responded that the deceased had participated in two ningxia career exams and one ningxia civil service exam, but failed to enter the interview stage, and it was not what the article said that he "repeatedly won the first place in the written exams of the hometown province's career institutions."
it is sad that a big account with hundreds of thousands of fans has just disappeared. for the operator of this account, it is undoubtedly a huge loss. for contributors, it is also a loss of a platform for publishing "non-fiction" works. for users and the public, it may also reduce a window for attention and discussion of such public topics.
in the era of mobile internet, such incidents occur from time to time. in 2019, the "limited talent youth" account of the "mimeng" team launched "the death of a no. 1 scholar from a poor family", which attracted countless traffic for a while, but was soon removed from the shelves because the content was suspected of being false. in 2021, a popular article titled "another "lam"" was published on a non-fiction writing platform. the author is a former media person who married to qinghai for love and had children, but later claimed to have suffered domestic violence. however, after a joint investigation by the qinghai provincial women's federation, the public security department and other departments, many of the situations disclosed in the article are difficult to verify.
it is precisely because of the continuous occurrence of such online events that the author believes that in-depth reporting is needed today more than ever before. the subjects of in-depth reporting mentioned here are not only practitioners of professional news organizations, but also a large number of "self-media" practitioners and non-fiction writers.
of course, as a practitioner and researcher who has been dealing with in-depth reporting for 20 years, i am well aware that there has been a voice that has been heard over the years, namely, "china's in-depth reporting has declined." this statement does have some basis in reality, such as the total number of investigative journalists has decreased, the space for in-depth reporting has been reduced, and the in-depth reporting department has been abolished. the direct consequence is that when major news events occur, there are not as many in-depth reports as before.
the "before" here refers to the glorious period that in-depth reporting once experienced, which was roughly from the 1990s to the first decade of this century. in these 20 years, the development trend of china's traditional media continued to rise, and so did the in-depth reporting that relied on it, with a large number of famous journalists and works emerging. however, after 2010, with the widespread use of mobile internet technology in the field of communication and other reasons, in-depth reporting and its parent traditional media encountered major challenges and even setbacks.
however, observing the social development in recent years, we can find that the audience's demand for in-depth reporting is still huge, and the signs of the "rebirth" of in-depth reporting are very obvious. for example, the covid-19 pandemic, the sino-us trade dispute, the russia-ukraine conflict, etc. are all extremely complex events. how can the audience grasp the basic context of the matter and how to distinguish the authenticity of relevant information still largely depends on the in-depth reporting of various media. therefore, the importance of in-depth reporting has been highlighted again.
in addition, with the development of communication technology, "everyone is a reporter" has become a reality, and a direct consequence is that there are many voices in the public opinion field, and various opinions have emerged, resulting in "an excess of opinions" and "not enough facts". at the same time, for various profit or other purposes, rumors and false information are endless, so that the phenomenon of "it takes only one mouth to spread rumors, but it takes a lot of effort to refute them" frequently occurs. such a public opinion ecology has also put forward a greater demand for in-depth reports that focus on "providing facts".
at the same time, we see that in-depth reporting itself is also developing. for example, the non-fiction writing mentioned above, which is developing rapidly on various platforms, is a typical example. non-fiction writing is similar to the feature articles we talked about in the in-depth reporting class, but now it has been equipped with the wings of the internet, with more writing subjects and diversified presentation methods. for another example, data journalism and visual journalism have also developed rapidly in recent years, focusing on speaking with numbers and charts, which can also be seen as a new type of in-depth reporting practice after the rise of the internet.
therefore, as long as we can keep pace with the times, we will find that what has changed in-depth reporting are only the organizational methods, production methods and presentation methods. after adapting to the new communication conditions, in-depth reporting can be "reborn from the ashes."
