| The development of 'citizen journalism' and use of user-generated content (UGC) has led some to speculate that journalists are now redundant: Why pay someone to do what others will provide for free? The counter-argument is the Wikipedia effect: Joe Public can write whatever he wants, and you get a good idea of the facts from him, but for the truth you need a proper journalist.
In fact, the 'public' tend not to trust journalists in this way. In a recent Ipsos Mori trust poll, just 19% of British adults trusted journalists to tell the truth.
Why is this?
The role of the news journalist has changed considerably over the last century. In the early 1900s a journalist was very much an intrinsic figure in their community, be it national or local, yet he wrote for a specific audience: the middle classes. The aristocracy looked down on the newspapers, the working classes were only beginning to embrace their potential. But middle class gentlemen needed to know things, and the best source of information was the paper.
I'm not claiming journalists were held up as pillars of society - far from it. Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop shows that journalists were ridiculed as out of touch and corrupt back then too. But they were still trusted, authoritative figures.
The general reputation of politicians (another poorly trusted profession) was tainted by years of spin doctors, corruption and scandals. Who exposed these flaws? Usually journalists. Surely that is a mark of recognition for investigative journalism?
Yet journalists too are tainted with spin and corruption; twisting facts to suit a story, under-reporting of inconvenient details, pushing one argument against another. Traditionally the news media (paper, radio and TV) dictated what was newsworthy, and what was not newsworthy. Editors wielded power. What changed so dramatically was not technique but demand.
Look at the national tabloids. Their sales are falling for a variety of reasons, just like all the other papers, yet they still sell millions of copies. Why are they still reasonably popular? Because they print what they think their readers want.
Unfortunately, this tends to be celebrity gossip, attacks on politicians and semi-nekkid girls. Tabloid journalists work as hard as anyone else in the industry, yet they are looked down upon because of their subject matter. The fact remains though: people do buy the News of the World and the Sun for just those reasons.
It stems from the general interest in the unusual, the personal and the humourous. The internet is a great example - look at leading news websites' 'Most Read' lists. There will be a couple of celebrity stories, the big story of the day (possibly political) and at least three 'quirky' stories: "Condoms 'too big' for Indian men"; "She who laughs last - songstress Susan Boyle"; and "Posters show killer gang members as old men" were some of the most popular stories today. They aren't important stories, but they are interesting, and that is the current consumer demand. Interesting, entertaining, diverting news; and if the story is not all of the above, then journalists must make it so.
And so we come to citizen journalism: the idea that with current technology, anyone anywhere can be a journalist
The tangibility of 'news' has evaporated: news is no longer something you sit down to watch or read for half an hour: it is something you absorb in small chunks whenever you have the time. So graduates seeking to become news journalists need to attract immediate attention and present stories in concise, understandable bursts.
Journalists have lost the power to control the news. But this doesn't mean they have lost the power to convey the news. Anyone with internet access can post information online, but this is NOT journalism. Journalistic values remain the same: gathering facts, checking them, combining them together and reporting them in a fair, accurate manner.
Anything else is comment and opinion, not news. There is an important difference, and graduates must recognise the real danger of citizen journalism and UGC.
The line between news and opinion is too easy to blur on the web. |
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