Stone tablets aren’t used to tell stories anymore, but they’re still used to help identify buildings. The same is true of the concept of stories: A 5,000-word piece in the New York Times might have more nuance and depth of reporting, but a short video on TikTok about something happening in a community might have the same level of emotional and personal connection, says Josh Hatch, senior director of digital at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“You look at younger generations: They’re not necessarily voracious book readers. That’s probably bad, but if you go back to the ancient Greeks, they were lamenting how books were preventing people from remembering things and thinking,” he says. “Everyone’s always afraid of the next technology.”
Stories remain an important and vital tool for education and sharing information, something Hatch believes remains true now and will remain true in the future. “There’s always a story. There’s always some form of narrative. I think that’s part of the human psyche. That’s how we convey information. I think you’re seeing that story is still, at root, a way that we communicate. The format of that story has exploded.”
What has also exploded since Hatch’s first appearance on It’s All Journalism, 11 years ago, is the distrust in the news media and the spreading of mis- and disinformation. “There is a specific, if not well-organized, campaign to foster distrust in institutions in general. That’s not new,” he says. “There’s been a campaign against the news media for decades. If you are able to create distrust and confusion among people, you can exploit it.”
As a result, people say with an almost sense of pride that they don’t trust the media, something Hatch feels is “a cop-out.”
“A certain healthy skepticism is warranted, but I think it’s descended into outright cynicism and self-serving cynicism,” he says. “This might sound like a strange analogy but it reminds me of kids who say, almost proudly, ‘I’m bad at math.’ Well, you’re bad at math because you’re not interested or you didn’t have a good teacher. But you were bad at walking when you were a baby until you developed the skills and the muscles and the practice. ‘I don’t believe them’ is a cop-out. It doesn’t recognize that it requires a certain amount of thinking, of effort, of engagement, to understand what are the motivations, what are the signals that something is true or not, or biased or not. It’s easier to write them all off. I find that to be really cynical and I think there is a bit of a cultural wave to do that. It’s an abdication of responsibility.”
Josh Hatch, senior director of digital at The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses fake news, misinformation and the evolution of digital news over the last decade.
