My professor gave us another assignment (yippee): "At it's core, the job of the working journalist today is unchanged". Well, honestly, I believe this is true.
The job of the journalist is unchanged, as I said in my last post. The job of the journalist is still to present news to the public from an objective viewpoint. However, just because I say the job is unchanged, it doesn't mean that the old dog hasn't picked up a few new tricks. Now that journalism and media in general are headed onto the internet, journalists have had to pick up a whole new set of skills for use in the digital age. Most if not all journalists need to know computer skills at the intermediate level so that they can follow blogs online, find information that may be breaking on the internet (like news from Iran coming through Twitter), and making webpages. Every spectrum of journalism now has an online component: newspapers have a homepage, radio stations have their music online, even television stations have their broadcasts to their sites. So, basically, the job hasn't changed. Just the tools used to get it done.
However, journalists, from the onset of blogs, have another factor which has changed their jobs. Not long ago, journalists were able to present news without fearing repercussions for getting a story or facts wrong. With today's blogging community monitoring the news 24/7, there is little room for error from journalists. This is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it forces the reporting community to be accurate and thorough in its reporting. On the other hand, it puts journalists on edge for fear of getting a story wrong and having their reputation and credibility utterly destroyed.
Though the job is unchanged, the factors weighing down on journalists at this time are considerable. Not only is the medium changing, but so is the audience. People these days don't care about news. They don't want to hear about the wars and poverty and what politicians are saying. They would rather stay closed off in their little boxes and be entertained rather than informed. To get to these people, journalists are trying all kinds of new methods such as starting blogs or using social media like Facebook. As long as they remember that their first goal is to inform and not entertain, I think that journalists will beat out the competition from bloggers and social media and maintain their position as a credible and reliable source of information.
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Very good read. To the point.
ReplyDeleteHowever, let me pose you a question:
In order to get to these "people who would rather stay in their boxes," reporters must become more invasive.
How far would you be willing to go to "get the word out?"
I think you've made some very points here. But I think that no matter what the journalists try to do to get those people "who would rather stay closed off in their little boxes" they will always tune in to what they want. Maybe they shouldn't worry about them and just inform other citizens who are looking forward to the informations avalaible to them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments guys.
ReplyDeleteI guess I wasn't clear enough in my post. What I was saying is that there are the people who wish to isolate themselves from the news and it is these people who journalists try to reach through social media and blogs as well as other means. My problem with this is that they make the news flashier to try to attract people and, in the process, might add too much oppinion instead of facts and this is not what journalism is. Journalism is reporting facts first and foremost; leave the oppinon for your readers. So I guess my post wasn't about a strategy to get to those people who wish to close themselves out. I'm just saying that journalists need to draw a very fine line between fact and oppinon in their pursuit of more viewers.
And it should be 'opinion' not 'oppinion'. My bad.
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