In seventh grade, distraught from my recent findings on MSNBC that lip gloss may cause cancer, I began my search for a new news source. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular–most of my life questions were fielded by Seventeen and Teen Vogue–but I was hoping for something that could convey huge amounts of information to someone with an impossibly short attention span.

Seventh grade was 2005 trickling into 2006. It wasn’t until 2007 when election coverage became serious and I finally found the only articles on the election that I could begin to understand–The New York Times graphs and multimedia articles. In 2008, when this interview with Steve Duenes, Graphics Director of the NYTimes came out, I first saw the future of news.

It was this email that Steve Duenes quoted in his interview that made this change so apparent to me:

From: Nicholas Kristof Subject: the power of art

in september i traveled with bill gates to africa to look at his work fighting aids there. while setting the trip up, it emerged that his initial interest in giving pots of money to fight disease had arisen after he and melinda read a two-part series of articles i did on third world disease in January 1997. until then, their plan had been to give money mainly to get countries wired and full of computers.

bill and melinda recently reread those pieces, and said that it was the second piece in the series, about bad water and diarrhea killing millions of kids a year, that really got them thinking of public health. Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn’t the article itself that had grabbed him so much — it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia. 

I’m sending you a copy of the story and graphic by interoffice mail. whoever did the graphic should take a bow.

nick kristof

The Elements of Journalism ends with a discussion on the purpose of journalism as a whole–something to be defined by its new constituents who are redefining news gathering and sharing. I don’t disagree with this conclusion. I also see the level of involvement of bloggers, tweeters and social media activists only growing in the upcoming decades, but I think the way in which we encapsulate our information is already rapidly changing. Visual communication skills should slowly be integrated into the current curriculum. Our 3,500 word articles will become a combination of a short video or handful of pictures taken with our phones, supplemented by clean visual representations that hopefully every grade school student can create just as easily as the heralded 5 paragraph essay.

Journalism is becoming more loosely defined with the rise of new outlets to share stories (and what is a “story”, exactly?), but I think the key will be in the ways in which we communicate. I don’t see news turning into a pure feed of microblogs and mobile uploads. I think it has a lot more to do with the tools and skills we are given that enable us to communicate more effectively with visual representations of our stories.

“What do you want news to do?”

When we were asked this question two weeks ago, I had many vehement opinions about the future of news. I had been thinking about almost nothing else since hired at the Globe. Like many millennials, I was accustomed to the free access of information. When I began my job, and the reality of the journalism crisis suddenly woke me from my naiveté, my mind dashed off daydreaming about that “ah-ha” moment when journalists exalted their newfound path into the digital age. But as I continue to learn more, it seems as though there may not be an “ah-ha” moment, and that the entire enterprise of news is poised to crumble. And unlike other industries, there is yet to be a comparable, financially viable replacement to this establishment.

As I ruminated on and researched the possibilities for journalism, it became clear that–regardless of the current state of news–journalism is a highly skilled and necessary craft essential to progress as a modern society. Without it, we would be lost in something similar to the Dark Ages, subject to a sort of tyranny that naturally evolves from ignorance. In my mind, the question “What do you want news to do?” permutated into, “What are the pieces of modern news that must be preserved?”

First and foremost, the kernel of news is its ability to keep society informed and its leaders accountable. Regardless of where our new news comes from, it should continue to hold this value if we hope to preserve democracy.

New independent journalism seems to be moving back to a partisan viewpoint, which is refreshing and honest. I’m personally more trusting sources that admit their bias, than those that insist on their neutrality only to be engaging in clandestine partnerships. However, it’s important to remind the public that there are many opinions in the world, and we are each entitled to our own. The internet age has consequentially brought a din of information that individuals are left to sift through and make sense of. We have access to more kinds of media and knowledge than ever before, and it’s only natural to seek out the types of information we’re most interested in. But with partisan journalism, there needs to be a way to serve content from both sides of the playing field.

A journalist is a curator of cultural knowledge. News is like a museum of the present. A museum’s mission is to preserve the important aspects of art and culture through carefully curated sets of artifacts. News serves much the same role, but in real-time. Like curators, journalists train to dedicate their lives to the preservation of moments of reality in an insightful and engaging way. They encapsulate culture and share insight. Without curators, we are doomed to walk digital flea markets, hoping to stumble upon an important event that is crucial to our understanding of current affairs. But like most flea markets, all we’re likely to find is a collection of old recipe books from someone’s great aunt.

For journalism to continue someone must care about the preservation and curation of democracy. In a capitalist society, that someone also has to make a living from it. As is evident in software (specifically mobile) free is passable, but most paid services have a more polished product. The code is cleaner; the bugs are fewer. Obviously there are outliers on either end, but realistically this is the exception, not the rule. So as we move forward the question of “how?” remains unanswered. How does journalism remind us that we are lost without it, before we are actually lost and without?