The internet has revolutionized how we intake news. Also, how fast we receive news. But in that sometimes brings up the problem of accuracy and thus opinions forming on an ongoing story can be inaccurate when more facts emerge. A perfect example of this is the Penn State scandal that recently erupted. Ashton Kutcher, a popular twitter fanatic, spoke out against the firing of a college football coach before he learned the reasons which were the coach was covering up for his defense coordinator sexually abusing children. Followers of his on twitter knew this reason though and lashed out at him. Also recognize that in this example how social media changes who we get the news from. The common person wants their news fast but accurate, which has always been true but with the internet that is more challenging than ever.
In that, we are observing the death of the newspaper as we know it with the evolution of advertising in one is less and less desirable for companies. But one thing that will never change is the need for the person capturing the story first-hand. The only difference is just how quickly talented that person has to be. As before a man might have to burn the midnight oil to make a first edition, now he has to be even quicker than that.
So I ask you how is all of this not interesting? It might be just my aspirations to be a journalist but I think these are the most interesting and trying times for journalism. Also, hope some of this helps you.
(Source: yahfreakbitch)
shortformblog:
Newsweek: Newsweek and The Atlantic, shame on you.
wardrox:
How far removed from the real world do you have to be to think publishing, with no warning, a graphic image of a dead or dieing dying person covered in blood is fine? Newsweek’s Tumblr even calls the posting of the grotesque image “a necessity in an age of media-driven rumors”. [more]
A few things: Newsweek and The Atlantic are fighting two different schools of thought on this specific issue. There are groups of people that won’t be convinced unless they see this image or a similar one, and there are people who won’t ever be OK with showing an image like this, ever. You can’t — and won’t — please both.
As Wardrox writes: “I can only assume the people in charge of the Tumblr feeds for both Newsweek and The Atlantic live in some corner of an office, detached from the real world in some kind of bubble. The kind of bubble where reason and logic, common sense and common decency become warped by deadlines, hits, spin and hype.”
No, they’re not. They’re journalists. They’re people who dread these decisions. They have to make tough decisions like this all the time. (This was one of the tougher ones.) Ultimately, though, they decided they would rather be honest with their readers than to hide an important issue from view. And a lot of people liked that they presented it. And a lot of people didn’t. That’s the nature of journalism — not everyone’s going to like everything you do. When presented with the issue ourselves, we went with posting it. We dreaded it. One of our regular readers made a comment about this. We didn’t back down from the decision, but we did start a dialogue.
The news is the news. Newsweek and The Atlantic have no interest in running gruesome pictures like that all the time. They did it because the news value was extremely high. WIll everyone like it? No. But when you have a photo like that and mere moments to decide on whether something is the right choice, you have to go with your gut. That’s how journalism works. Sometimes it, unfortunately, isn’t pretty. We try to limit those moments to when it really matters.
(Source: sausage-roller, via shortformblog)
Mat Honan — Milly Dowler vanished in 2002. It set off a huge sensation in the UK, similar to the Natalee Holloway case in the United States. Now, reports have surfaced that News of the World hacked into her voicemail.
According to the New York Times:
[T]he newspaper not only intercepted messages left at the cellphone number of the girl, Milly Dowler, 13, by her increasingly frantic family after her disappearance, but also deleted some of those messages when her voice mailbox became full - thus making room for new ones and listening to those in turn. This confused investigators and gave false hope to Milly’s relatives, who believed it showed she was still alive and deleting the messages herself.
The News had already been busted for hacking into the voicemail boxes of the UK’s elite. Royals and celebrities and political leaders. But this time the subject was a missing 13 year old girl. And its actions actively hampered the investigation.
I think we can all agree this was reprehensible. But it won’t be the last time. The age of the hacker journalist is upon us. We’ve heard so much about programmer journalists in the last few years, who use programming skills to crunch and present data, that we forget about reverse side of an era of reporters who know their way around a computer: hacking.
The journalist has long been a gatekeeper who passes along information, which is sometimes illegally procured (see: the Wikileaks cables, or the Pentagon Papers). But we’re entering an era when many journalists have the necessary skills to actively purloin that information themselves. Careers will be made and undone by hacker journalism.
Sometimes the information that comes out of these will be for the public good. You’ll see corporate and government malfeasance exposed. But it’s certainly also going to be abused. We’re going to be reading celebrity’s emails and viewing top-secret products under development. (And of course, the reverse is true as well. HP famously hacked into reporters’ data to try and figure out where internal leaks were coming from.)
Yet when laws are broken, we’ll rarely know it. It has taken almost a decade for the Milly Dowler scandal to emerge from the time her voicemail was hacked. Hacking is easily covered up. It’s easy to place blame on a source. After all, if a reporter is willing to break the law, why not go one step further and hide behind a non-existant anonymous source? (See, for example, Michael Gallagher, who did just that with Chiquita’s voicemails.)
In short, this is the new normal. A new tool in the reporter’s arsenal, albeit one we’ll only hear about when someone gets busted.
(Source: gizmo.do)
![nickturse:
If not for Eric Alterman’s smart new Columbia Journalism Review piece, “The Girl Who Loved Journalists,” I might have been too ashamed to admit that as I watched David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (as with the three previous Swedish film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy), I spent an inordinate amount of time marveling at the research skills of the “Girl,” Lisbeth Salander, and the somewhat peripheral issues of journalism that are addressed in the movie.
As Salander unraveled murders in no time flat, I thought back to how long it took me to do the research to expose long-secret massacres and other mass killings of civilians or the number of secret U.S. drone bases or how the Pentagon arms Mid-East despots and sighed more than once.
But it seems I’m not alone in focusing on the journalism. As Alterman astutely observes:
The trilogy’s plot… frequently turns on matters of journalistic propriety of the kind that are rarely discussed outside badly lit newsroom cafeterias and gloomy university seminar rooms. We see Mikael and Erica [Berger, Blomkvist’s lover, best friend, and editor] struggle with love and danger, but also with questions of proper sourcing in a magazine article versus a book, a little magazine versus a powerful (and compromised) newspaper. We see the drudgery of research, of interviewing sources, and building a story one detail at a time; of trying to figure out who’s lying and why, how to publish what one knows without giving away what one doesn’t, and then how to manipulate the numbskullery of television to build the biggest echo chamber possible for one’s work.
Alterman’s piece is filled with other intelligent observations about the power of money in journalism and how most of us who report don’t have much of it. I could go on, but you’d be better off reading the whole article here.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxb1qofqfv1qdtt31o1_500.jpg)
