Vikes’ three-year collaboration with the Tampere University continued in October with a course on sustainable journalism. The course aims to provide students with knowledge about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of Agenda 2030 and how journalism can contribute to achieving them.
What is sustainable journalism?
“Sustainable journalism offers enduring perspectives on current issues, with a forward-looking approach. In a globalized world, we must work together to solve global problems, and journalists have the power to guide society towards sustainability,” said course coordinator and doctoral researcher Matleena Ylikoski at the first lecture of the “Perspectives on Sustainable Journalism” course.
Sustainable journalism is journalism that is socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable. Matleena seeks to promote the principles of sustainable journalism through three main objectives set for the course:
- The course increases students’ awareness of the sustainable development framework, Agenda 2030, and related international monitoring tools from a journalistic perspective. Understanding these goals helps students engage with sustainable development topics and hold authorities accountable in these areas.
- The course broadens students’ ability to reflect on their relationship to journalism and its values. Students gain tools to think about what kind of society they want to work for as journalists.
- The course offers practical tools for creating journalism that is environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable.
The course will address sustainable journalism from multiple perspectives. The five lecture sessions cover topics related to the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of news and digital media. The course also envisions a sustainable future for journalism and explores sustainable journalism’s potential to address declining readership. Vikes’ three-year support for sustainable journalism education at the Tampere University will culminate next year with the release of an online course on sustainable journalism.
What is the societal significance of teaching sustainable journalism?
The course’s first lecturer, project manager and journalist Anna Maris from Sweden’s FOJO Institute, explained to students that journalism is often seen as separate from the rest of society. In reality, journalism is just as significant a part of the system as any other industry.
According to Anna, adding a sustainable perspective to stories is not difficult but requires adopting new approaches to story creation. “For example, when reporting on a new runway being built at an airport, you wouldn’t just write about how many more planes can land or how the runway promotes business. Instead, you would also include information on how emissions from the runway impact the environment and future,” she explained.
Matleena also emphasized the responsibility of future journalists in societal development. She sees journalism as one of the key social influencers: what is done in journalism has far-reaching effects on society.
“Adopting sustainability principles in the media sector is also a matter of justice. Commitments to sustainable development and legislation apply equally to everyone, including media companies,” Matleena emphasized journalism’s shared responsibility.
Could sustainable journalism attract readers to traditional journalism and information overload?
According to Matleena, this is a challenging issue, and no one has found a “silver bullet” solution. From the perspective of sustainable journalism, it’s essential to ask how factual and accurate information providing journalism can still exist even a hundred years from now.
Matleena has observed a sense of frustration with traditional journalism among the Finnish audience. Evidence of this can be seen in the positive reception of Uusi Juttu, suggesting that readers are dissatisfied with clickbait headlines and fast-paced, overloading and negative news streams.
“The viewpoint of sustainable journalism is that although a clickbait strategy may be financially profitable, it’s not economically sustainable, as clickbaiting erodes people’s trust and respect for news media,” Matleena explained.
What could sustainable journalism offer instead of clickbait headlines?
Matleena suggests that sustainable journalism’s approach is to ask people themselves: “What do they want from news, what kind of headlines would they like to click on, and what kinds of stories would they like to read? The aim wouldn’t be to provide more sensations, cat videos, or ‘fun content,’ but rather to identify the types of information people need to participate in society in an informed way, and what kind of journalism would best meet these needs. Such audience-oriented thinking could be a welcome change for the general public.”