Last week I got to go to an event for Joris Luyendijk‘s newly translated book. The book is titled “こうして世界は誤解する” in Japanese (the English version is called “People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East“). 6 years after its original publication in the Netherlands, he says he’s feeling the same kind of frustration toward international news reporting.

• Reporting affects news. It’s inevitable how something is reported transforms the truth.
• Journalists tend to only pay attention to new things. News is always an exception to a rule.
• We are relying on media to hear about the paralysis in journalism.
• Since references to shared values is required, the fact can’t be received in the exact same way across cultures.
• News coverage has been limited in terms of airtime, paper/magazine pages. There is no easy cure for the imperfect world with tool and time restraints.

Share Your Learning Curve

He offers one way of reinventing journalism, which is what he calls “sharing your learning curve”.

• When you don’t understand something at all, you lose interest.
• If you know well about something, the same kind of knowledge is not valuable news to you.
• By sharing your learning curve and having conversation, you can offer the readers some pegs to hang their knowledge on.

He is practicing this method on his Banking Blog on the Guardian site. There’s a good video on this topic, his session at TEDｘAmsterdam:

His book title in Japanese translates to “This is How World Misunderstands”. I feel I’m drawing in information every day, but feeling that I still don’t know enough. His talk encouraged me to accept that status and keep learning while sharing what I know from my point of view.