Journalism has spent much of the digital era arguing about speed: how quickly stories are published, how quickly audiences move on and how quickly newsrooms adapt to new platforms. Tanjil Rashid’s reflections point in a different direction. The question is not only how journalism changes, but what forms of attention it should keep.
Why Criticism Still Matters
Book reviewing, cultural criticism and the long-form essay can look slow beside rolling news. That is precisely their value. They give writers time to establish context, make distinctions and develop an argument rather than simply register that something happened.
That does not make older forms automatically better. Much twentieth-century journalism was narrow in who it commissioned, promoted and treated as authoritative. Preserving depth without preserving exclusion is the harder task.
Diversity Is About More Than Headcounts
Representation matters inside newsrooms, but diversity also affects what counts as a story, which books are reviewed, whose expertise is trusted and which audiences are imagined when a piece is written. A broader newsroom can change editorial judgement as well as appearance.
The Skills That Survive Platform Changes
Platforms change quickly. Clear writing, patient reporting, scepticism and the ability to listen do not. For students interested in journalism, that is probably more useful than trying to predict which format will dominate five years from now.
The future of journalism may be digital by default, but it still depends on habits that are older than any platform: reading closely, asking better questions and knowing when a quick answer is not enough.
