Week 2 Post

Catherine Ford says it best when she writes:

“A newspaper reader today has some assurances that what he is reading is clearly labeled opinion or verifiable fact. There are names on the masthead, names on the stories, avenues for counter-argument or complaints. Newspapers, as concrete ‘things’ have reputations to uphold and to live up to.”

The overwhelming belief, at least at one time, was when reading a newspaper it was more than likely that what was being reported was labeled as either “verifiable fact or opinion”. With shrinking staffs and disappearing advertising revenue, reliability has taken a step back in newspaper reporting.

And although people have become worried about the reliability of newspapers, it seems certain the way Ford projects it that even more people feel as if the Internet allows for misconstrued information without any serious fact checking. Ford makes note that as of now, the current model of the Internet cannot make up for the trust that newspapers have accumulated over time with their readers. Which is true for someone who has grown up on reading a newspaper daily, but not for those that have been getting their information solely from the Web during the past few years.

As journalism students, it seems as if the phrase: “journalism is dying” has been beaten into our heads. But as Ford points out, journalism is not dead but perhaps shifting toward a new medium. She mentions that rotary telephones are technically still around, they have just been continuously updated as time and more importantly people have changed. Newspapers in terms of the format are perhaps likely on life support, but journalism will never die. People are in constant need of a story, and as time moves forward it seems like journalism will be evolving toward a different platform or a different medium. As Ford reiterates, journalism is not dead it’s just moving in a different direction. We just need to hope that it’s a good and reliable direction.

 

 

In James Carey’s “The Dark Continent of Journalism”, he brings to light one of the big issues as it pertains to journalism, the lead, and revealing information as it becomes available. He uses an example of a lead written many years ago in which there is an automatic sense of understanding in that the reader will more than likely know about the story before the nuts and bolts are revealed. However as Carey points out, “journalism must be examined as a corpus, not as a set of isolated stories”. The lead to that story assumed that you knew the individuals were former students who attempted to get away with the perfect crime and that they were serving prison term. The issue is that there’s no in between, nothing to keep us up to date on the information.

That’s why Carey points out that many times, journalists attempt to keep a story alive. They want to keep the story relevant so that all the information can be revealed. That in turn leads Carey to argue that, “journalism is a curriculum”. In suggesting this, he is making note that journalism is not just a vast array of little stories, but rather a plethora of many stories packaged together into one big curriculum and that we fail to see that. Therefore Casey is left to suggest, “it is a weakness of American journalism that the curriculum is so badly integrated and cross-referenced that each story starts anew as if no one had ever touched the subject before”.

“Both journalism and education assume the constant student and the constant reader”. Let’s face it, most people do not keep continuous up-to-date knowledge on current events nor do they follow every story from beginning to middle to end.