Week 2 Blog Post

The "delivery of human communication has morphed" (Ford). 

Nothing more accurately described the state of journalism than Ford's statement on the notion that newspapers are dead. She used the statement to instead illustrate the changing nature of the journalistic profession. With the advent of the internet, everyone has become a journalist, and the internet has no way of sifting through those who are reliable and those who are not. The internet, she writes, has "no method to replicate trust built up over the centuries" by newspapers. 

Newspapers represented a retrievable, storable form of history. But an abundance of "news" on the internet, means that varying, opinionated records exist, some not based on the facts that newspapers would build their stories off of. The internet has no way of distinguishing a traditional journalist from the one on his couch, speculating on any issue thrown his way. Without values and standards governing web publishing, the forum becomes convoluted and without trust in the public eye, as Ford described. Carey explains that journalism is “so badly integrated” it was as if “no one had ever touched the subject before” (149). Anyone can start from scratch, bring to light a new issue, and assume that they are the first to publish such a story.

Carey, in his piece, however, feels that the school of journalism wrongly “assumes the constant student and the constant reader” (152). While this may have been the case in the past, with the internet, everyone is constantly online, constantly reading, even though it may not be the physical product of the news. Everyone becomes a consumer of information--whether the news is accurate or inaccurate--on the internet.