Digitization offers completely new opportunities for knowledge processing and networking that we as a society can use. This also means leaving the attention economy behind and, for example, placing strategic social megatopics on resubmission. To achieve this, science and journalism need to move closer together to think in terms of joint information platforms.
»The more we absorb into ourselves, the greater our mental capacity becomes.« (Seneca)
Journalism often prepares topics in an unstructured way and in individual cases. However, social developments (e.g. social inequality) and global challenges (e.g. climate crisis) cannot be presented well in individual cases, as topics are lost sight of far too quickly instead of being regularly resubmitted. Long-term scientific data and indices are more suitable for illustrating processes of social change and bringing the journalistic question into focus: Where do we stand as a society?
Various building blocks are needed for this: Science and journalism must move closer together and, in data journalistic, cross-media projects, develop a kind of digital collective memory that gives society orientation in solving social problems.
Those who make strategic use of the digital knowledge architectures can thus also provide journalism with a new social added value by acting as a mediator between science and education and further developing its control function for democracy in the digital world. futur eins wants to help make the full range of digitization options available to journalism and develop the information platforms of tomorrow.
With the digital age, two pillars of media financing have collapsed: advertising revenues and sales figures. The financing of journalism must therefore take new paths today. Non-profit status and platform economy can not only be two options, they can also be thought of together.
The digital structural change of the public sphere has radically changed the way we communicate and brought us new challenges – from disinformation to information overload. News literacy, including digital literacy, is thus the new foundation of the knowledge society. We help to implement it from politics to civil society.
Not everywhere is free and independent journalism a matter of course. futur eins is involved in the promotion of democracy abroad and works with journalists and civil society on strategies to strengthen media freedom and pluralism, as for example in Eastern Europe.