The biggest threat to journalism? Journalists!

Posted on | August 1, 2009 | 4 Comments

Blogs are not the greatest threat to newspaper journalism; journalists should look at themselves first!

Of course….there are valuable things newspapers do. The day-to-day detailed reporting of what’s going on is useful and the occasional original investigative work probably rights some wrongs. But does this make up for everything else?

If you’re a “journalist” who writes ill-researched articles on things you don’t understand, or content-free celebrity puff-pieces, or worthless lifestyle articles based on a few of your friends, then you should be worrying. Anyone can do that crap, and they’ll do it for free. But no, if you’re a hard-working, serious journalist who’s doing the difficult unglamorous stuff, bloggers probably aren’t your biggest threat.

The threat to real journalists and their precious newspapers are these other “journalists” and much of the content of the same newspapers. For every exposé of governmental misdeeds and investigation of corporate wrongdoing and expensive international story filed by an experienced reporter there are inaccurate, unimportant, trivial, overblown and worthless articles written by people who reduce the perceived value of newspapers to close to zero.

We all have many more sources of information and news to call on today, which means that we can be better informed than was ever the case in the past. We are therefore better able than ever before to recognize the crap that so many newspapers peddle as news today. Blogging, micro-blogging – these are not the real threat to journalism or to newspapers. Journalists need to put their own houses in order before they look for scapegoats elsewhere.

From Phil Gyford on Anyone Can Write this Crap.

Thanks to Richard Sambrook for the link.

Technorati Tags: journalism, newspapers, blogs, phil gyford

Category: authority, blogging, journalism

Comments

4 Responses to “The biggest threat to journalism? Journalists!”

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August 1st, 2009 @ 8:57 am

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Angela
August 2nd, 2009 @ 7:58 pm

Thank you so much for making that point very clear. On August 2, 2009, the Washington Post printed a diatribe by Ian Shapira in which he states that Gawker ripped off his story regarding a business coach named Anne Loehr who charges $500 – $2500 dollars to explain millenial generation behavior in the workplace. That “piece” of crap article was featured in the Washington Post’s Style section and was more on the line of the “puff” pieces you described. In fact, one reader wrote a letter to the editor bemoaning the fact that this journalist provided no objective stats to support Anne Loehr’s assertions. He just wrote it as if it were the gospel truth. Then he gets upset that Gawker (the blog) “stole” his article? They both ought to be ashamed at their stupidity. I understand why I have a dislike for mainstream news media…some of them have nothing valuable to discuss.
Michael Grant
August 5th, 2009 @ 4:31 am

“The day-to-day detailed reporting of what’s going on is useful and the occasional original investigative work probably rights some wrongs. But does this make up for everything else?”

Well, yes, because of the first law of media: the media is a business. Read here about Joseph Pulitzer, father of the modern media business:
http://www.michaelgrant.com/blog/2009/07/media-literacy-pulitzer-learns-to-pull.html
Recommended Links for August 13th | Alex Gamela - Digital Media & Journalism
August 13th, 2009 @ 4:04 pm

[...] The biggest threat to journalism? Journalists! [...]