Through free, much is free

Would you give your most beautiful dress to a dingy alteration shop to be shortened? Entrust your IWC to the repair desk in the supermarket? Take your beloved MG to the nearest mechanic for an engine check? Send your child to the cranky woman next door to take care of the little one? - And why do you go to 20Minuten, Facebook and Twitter for the "most important news of the day"? Anyone who bypasses a professional in order to save money or time - not to speak of naivety or stupidity - need not be surprised about crooked seams, failed repairs or worse. Especially not about incomplete information, ducks and their loudly quacking fellows, the Fake News.

By too many and more and more information consumers, social media are being confused with news services. Of course, Twitter, Facebook and Co. Of course, Twitter, Facebook and the like disseminate information, you can keep up to date with debates, watch cat videos (if you need to), and rarely pick up a hint of a possible prime event; but only those who consume real journalistic products in addition to the daily ticker-tape gobbledygook can judge how big the difference is between information that has been checked and prepared by journalists in a captivating way and a report that has been copied and posted from somewhere else.

The difficulty today is not getting information, but classifying it correctly, separating bullshit and lies from the truth, checking data for accuracy, tying stories together with a common thread. Journalists have learned to do this; they make it easier for you to find your way through the news chaos and help keep rants and ramblings at bay. But this only works if you go along with it - and trust validated information in established media, from senders who have acquired knowledge and reputation and who work out well-founded, well-told stories and reports for you.

This is not about the only correct view, "the correct" classification of events, because there rarely is one. It is about providing different, well-founded opinions that open up a spectrum in which you can form your own opinion. Journalism encourages you to think, to participate in internal or real discussions, to place yourself in the context of world events. If you base your attitude to the world on shaky or false news, you run the risk of stumbling over informative bumps in the road.

But which media can readers still trust? The Tom Kummer case has shown that even leading media spread falsehoods. Nevertheless, you're on the safer side with paid media. Because they can't afford to lose you - and invest the money they still earn in journalistic quality. But for how much longer? British newspapers, for example, are experiencing significant user growth, but only online. And only a fraction of the content read online is paid for. At the same time, advertising revenues and subscriber numbers are shrinking like butter in the sun.

There is also a great deal of rustling in the Swiss newspaper forest. Ringier and Tamedia are probably only the beginning of the big clean-up of the Swiss media industry in late summer. We are discussing fake news and are even considering new laws to combat false reports. Fake news wouldn't even have reached news status if there hadn't been a confusion at some point in media consumption between tweets, paid marketing content and quality reporting.

Today, content is called content and is considered more important than ever. Nevertheless, printed media seem to be a discontinued model. Yet printed material is still checked much more carefully than online messages, and is also proofread, designed and produced more elaborately. Because paper and printing cost money and the space on a page is limited. Thoughts are tweaked until they are just right, texts are read through two or three times, proofread and edited before they reach a reader. Of course, this process costs money - but very little compared to the time you save by not having to waste it on useless information babble.

If you don't want to cut off journalism and free opinion-forming, you have to produce digitally just as carefully. For a fee, of course. It's a mystery to me why everything is still available for free online. Independent journalism does not exist by itself. It needs time, space and, yes, money. Because writers need more to live on than the shavings they gnaw off their pencils. It is a bleak testimony that media professionals call on Tamedia to invest in journalism in view of good half-year figures. And that readers no longer attach any value to what they read.

Anne-Friederike Heinrich, Editor in Chief

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