Nausicaa Renner

[Commentary] The internet in its halcyon days was lauded as a open space that could promote free speech in the US and worldwide, but it is now a realm that has settled into domination by a few companies. As we enter an age in which the internet is fully integrated into our daily lives, the main channel by which we access information, a reconsideration of the values of the First Amendment is required.

This was the motivation for a symposium on May 1 at Columbia University called Disrupted: Speech and Democracy in the Digital Age. Attended by a mix of legal professionals, academics, and journalists, the message was clear: Legal thinking around the First Amendment must renew itself in the new era.

[Nausicaa Renner is editor of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s vertical at Columbia Journalism Review. ]

WikiLeaks used to be the press’s only source for anonymously submitted online document dumps. Since then, the press has developed its own digital capabilities and a comfort with leaked material—and WikiLeaks has strayed from editorial curation and toward publishing unedited archives.

Before the election, the conversation around Wikileaks focused on the question of whether or not the press should report on the Podesta e-mails, since they are so targeted, uncurated, and not even clearly newsworthy. The verdict, rightly, was that the press should report on the leaks: Glenn Greenwald argues in The Intercept, and Trevor Timm in The Guardian, that it is the journalist’s job to take what was leaked, decide what is newsworthy, and report on it. The role of the press is not only to report the leaks, but to interrogate the information and assess its newsworthiness. But now, after the election, there is another layer of transparency that is the press’s job to add: transparency on WikiLeaks itself.

While the war between the presidential candidates and the press rages on, more than 1,000 journalists gathered recently at the 2016 Online News Association conference in Denver (CO) for a conversation on the future of journalism. Here are five takeaways from the conference:

1. Facebook was dominant.
2. Publishers are desperate to connect.
3. Tech companies are lining up to help journalists find that audience.
4. The buzzword is monetization.
5. Trump is still the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room.