Making the future of journalism dialogues: We've been hacked

The Journalism and Media Lab (JAMLAB) will host this panel discussion on the future of journalism.

The past 12 months have been extraordinary for the news industry, both in South Africa and the rest of the continent. In South Africa we saw the exposure of the 'Guptabots' and the leaking of the Gupta emails, the closure of the print edition of The Times, a new board and a strike at the SABC. Wits Journalism's State of the Newsroom Report for 2017 captures many of these events. The public role and the business of news and information organisations and professionals are being hacked. On one side there are Google and Facebook that are taking the majority of digital advertising and social media to increasingly dominate news distribution. On the other side is a growing and fluid range of factors - from commercial pseudo-news sites to highly organised AI supported campaigns - aiming to blur the lines between real and fake and in some cases to actively discredit and threaten journalists. The threat is clear - the undermining of the relationship between news organisations and their audiences.

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