Reconstructive journalism as the genuine journalistic genre in the age of digital posmodernism

Abstract

The Ecology of Communication establishes that communication technologies determine the profile of any given society in which these technologies operate. Thus, the current era of digital Postmodernism is characterized, due to the rise of the Internet, mobile devices and social networks, by a type of information that is hyperabundant, chaotic and circulates at a hyper-fast speed. The immediate consequence of this is the suspension of credibility, the erosion of the experience of reality and the increasing presence of disinformation and fake news. As each technology configures each type of society, each type of society, according to its characteristics, is identified with a predominant type of journalism and genres. This theoretical research has been built upon a thorough review of relevant bibliography. Due to the described characteristics of digital Postmodernism and since the elementary function of journalism is to inform and testify to reality, we suggest that the stage of interpretive journalism has been overcome and a new one is proposed, which corresponds more adequately with the characteristics of the current stage. We have called this new stage the stage of reconstructive journalism. The genuine genres of this type of journalism and, therefore, of the current stage, are the reportage-at-large, the chronicle and fact-checking.