Quality Journalism Will Not Die

This is my attempt at a feature article that I have to write for my investigative journalism class, please leave some feedback/comments, cheers.

If one was to walk around the corridors of Dickson College and peruse the students who attend there they would probably be filled with a number of emotions, shock, disbelief and nausea to name only a few.

If one can get past the conspicuously blood shot eyes, drunken slur and complete disregard for any form of decency then maybe, just maybe the students who attend here may be deemed hopeful for government welfare. However short of a very generous social worker there is very little hope that these students won’t simply drop out and start smoking ice.

If we were to now take a short trip to the bustling metropolis of New York, New York. Were we to then grab a coffee and head up to the editor-in-chief’s of the New York Times office we would see something very different. The mood is tense, as he reads about the closing of more newspapers and wonders how long until he is out of the job.

With the relatively new medium of the internet having now officially reached V.2 there is very little hope for newspapers. Just to clarify V.2 stands for Version 2 of the internet. This new version has come into being as the internet has become fully interactive.

Nowadays if I want to see a man get hit in the groin I can find it with the click of the button, I can then post a video of myself laughing at the man getting hit in the groin, someone else will then post a video telling me that I shouldn’t be laughing. I will then inevitably go onto my facebook account and put my status to: Upset by some mean guy on youtube.

You get the picture. If I want to put a video for everybody on the face of the planet to see, I can. If I want all my friends to know that I am upset, I can. If I want to start a blog where I pass out half baked opinions as actual fact, I can. And this is where a problem presents itself.

Why would I read some journalists opinion on the war in Iraq when I can publish my own?

Newspapers are becoming redundant as news moves online. Of course newspapers are trying to make the shift online as well with many publishing their newspapers online. The problem is however is that online newspapers do not make money. The traditional money maker for newspapers is no more. The gold that was the classified pages has now moved online meaning newspapers are no longer profitable. Because now if I want to buy a house, meet a sexy single or tell people about my wedding I can do it all for free online.

Without this source of income the future for journalism does not look good. But the problem extends beyond the poor owner of the New York Times who is chewing his fingernails to the bone as he awaits the inevitable. The problem is that without a feasible income for newspapers who will report our news?

The short answer is that journalism will be overtaken by a new breed of citizen journalist. This idea sends a cold chill down the spine of almost every ‘serious journalist’ everywhere. They cannot imagine a world where they must compete with the slack jawed commoner for their news to be noticed. In fact the idea seems preposterous, and it is a very bad idea.

The vast amount of uninformed opinions that would be posted by every Tom, Dick and Harry would lead to a poorly informed society. Statistics of course would mean that there would have to be some good journalism out there that would be worth reading but the sheer amount of misinformation would make it impossible to navigate.

You may be sitting there saying to yourself, “So what? If journalists are so great they wouldn’t be dying out?”

Well, journalists may be dying out but society needs them. Imagine a world without journalists; politicians would be able to do whatever they pleased without fear of reprisal.

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America, [without newspapers], To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption." –David Simon, The Wire

Journalists are needed to keep society in balance and that is the long and short of it. You yourself may not read newspapers, or watch the news, or even listen to the hard hitting stories of the likes of Mel and Kochie. But you still benefit from them. Because while you don’t watch the news, someone does and this means journalists are reaching someone who will be outraged by the latest scandal. They will be so outraged they are sure to make something happen about it. Which in turn benefits you.

We now have the full problem; newspapers are dying and taking journalists with them. The journalists are being replaced with poorly informed citizen journalists on the world wide web, this new breed of journalists will never be able to do the job of their predecessors thus throwing society into chaos.

It is all sounding very grim, however if we remember the slack jawed plebes of Dickson College. There is not a lot that these students are proficient at, but one thing they can all do with amazing skill is operate the internet. In fact everyone born after the year 1990 has the internet as second nature.

The internet is where the news is heading, and as said statistically it is very likely that there will be some quality citizen journalism. Now we take these students who have an amazing control over the internet. How long will it take for them to find the good news? How long will it take for them to spread it virally, through facebook, msn and the like? The answer is not very long at all.
The problem however still persists that a free lance online journalist will have zero funding. How could they possibly cover news extensively without the resources to do so? Without money for trips to foreign countries or the capacity to sit in on parliament the average Joe journalist will not be able to deliver.

This problem is easily resolved. At universities across the world, copious amounts of money is spent on think-tanks which fund research that will hopefully discover something to benefit mankind, or just simply discover something. What then is stopping this money being spent on internet journalism? Journalism is just as good for society as a new discovery about a disease and it is a lot more frequent.

Newspapers may be dead, but journalism is not. To many the internet may seem like a scary, soul stealing machine but to the youth, who are the future of journalism, it is not. Citizen journalism is an inevitability and so long as it is well resourced citizen journalism is bound to still be quality journalism.