The traditional journalism school teaches that in order to be impartial, the journalist must be “objective”.
Reporters, for example, are not the subject of the stories they cover and as such, and as a rule, they should avoid narratives that include opinion, first-person accounts and a sense of sensibility with their sources.
However, these and other classical rules of journalism are being disrupted.
Audiences hungry for developing personal connections with media producers and journalists willing to challenge the limits between journalism and other storytelling techniques are creating new hybrids of classical journalistic genres, where chronicles are mix with long-form investigative reportage and feature interviews are developed in video blogs.
Using the new and emerging independent media in Cuba as a case study, Mariela Morales will explain why journalism, as we know it now, is as much about developing audiences trust based on the reporter's and the media's character as much as it is about telling relevant factual news.
Mariela Morales Suárez was born in Cuba in 1989, just when the Berlin Wall was falling. Her childhood elapsed in a Cuba that was increasingly isolated from the rest of the world yet was experiencing many social and economic changes. She, unlike her parents, grew up in a Cuba where U.S. dollars, foreign magazines, and American music were no longer persecuted and prosecuted by the Cuban government. She was also one of the four students in her province chosen to attend the School of Communication at the University of Havana. In 2009, at the beginning of her 3rd year of Journalism School, she immigrated to Miami with her family. Mariela attended Miami Dade College and transferred to The University of Pennsylvania in 2014, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Global Communication. During her senior year at Penn, she wrote an Honors Thesis about the evolution and disruption of the media landscape in Cuba. She is currently a research analyst for the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and The Annenberg School for Communication. As a Lenfest and Annenberg fellow, Mariela is conducting qualitative research about the local media ecosystem in the city of Philadelphia, as well as advancing the inclusion and diversity mission of the Lenfest Institute within the city of Philadelphia and beyond.