Symposium "Journalism in the Digital Age －Promoting Democracy or Facilitating Fake News?－"

The digital age has triggered a revolution in how news is produced and disseminated. In the United States, 15,000 journalists working for traditional news media lost their jobs in one recent year. In South Korea, the circulations of formerly influential dailies have shrunk to less than half of a decade ago while a new generation of digital-savvy readers now organize mass demonstrations via social media electing one president and impeaching another. While on the one hand, Internet news sites and social media have given voice to previously marginalized news consumers, on the other, “citizen journalists” demonstrate little understanding of journalistic ethics. Surveys indicate that while trust in the traditional media may be low, in the Internet media it is even lower. Is this the dawn of a new era of media freedom, or are we headed for digital anarchy? The purpose of this symposium is to seek answers to this question.

Date: 31 October 2018, 16:00 to 19:30 (registration starts at 15:30)
Venue:Ibuka Masaru Memorial Hall, International Conference Centre, Waseda University, Tokyo (1-104 Totsukamachi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo)

Language: English/Japanese (simultaneous translation)

Organized by: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES),  The Waseda University School of Journalism