Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, wrote a column for the Miami Herald yesterday titled, “What readers want vs. what they need.” It represents in one concise package the cultural divide that is preventing so many newsrooms from progressing. This column neatly identifies some of the tenets of journalism [...]
This is a mirror post of an editorial I wrote for The Exception Magazine (here for post). I enjoyed writing this because it was written for readers instead of for other journalists. Journalists suddenly noticed their industry looks like all the other ones they write about on Wall Street. Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain [...]
In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart’s skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart’s eight-minute jab-fest was an example of good journalism. Something tells me Stewart – a comedian – would disagree.
While the Daily Show’s bit on CNBC was hilarious (video below), it should have prompted every working journalist to engage in some serious self reflection. The piece, instead, held up a mirror to a system that is obviously in need of a fix: journalists with all-access passes to the rich and powerful lobbing softballs at the crooks who got us into this economic mess in the first place. Sure CNBC does not represent every working reporter out there, and there are plenty of good examples of financial journalism that warned of the looming meltdown years before it happened (even though it was tragically and largely ignored by the public – but that’s another debate). The problem is we are losing credibility and fast no thanks to the massive cut in resources newspapers are enduring.
Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”
This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin’s day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities.
In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise.
As a business model, you’re giving incentive to companies to participate and encourage participation with the news and other media companies. This allows journalists to go where the people go instead of forcing them to come to the news, enforcing a beat system and community-driven content.
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So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn’t only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people.
uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours. It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of their own videos, images news, games, information and other content. uNews can’t actually be called “uNews.”
uNews needs to be for everyone AND news. And it has to be as fun and interesting to be a part of as all of your awesome Apple products. uNews must be a paradigm shift on how we operate on the Web. It must serve as a focusing point for all communications. Otherwise, it will fail like the other micropayment systems did.
Other systems segregated content away from the Web instead of integrating people into each other. That is the key. uNews must CENTALIZE the web instead of further DECENTRALIZING it.
But wouldn’t it be great of a news company made it? [...]
As sources of information proliferate, journalists are losing their special status as the town crier, telling us new and surprising and important things about our world. With information coming at us directly from every source imaginable, journalism gets lost in the avalanche of information overload. A recent article called Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in [...]
Objectivity in journalism is not only a fallacy but a dangerous goal.
She basically said in order to be an objective journalist, you cannot have values. Therefore, because journalists publish themselves to other people, in order to remain perfectly objective, you cannot make moral judgments on what you observe and write about, otherwise you are inherently biased.
With this argument, an objective journalist is ammoral. Therefore, of the three purposes above, an ammoral journalist can only “inform the public.”
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but what you can do for SND