So listening to the whole Boston situation, information was more time than not coming from 'citizen journalists.' Between the rise of the internet/social media and the decline of the tradition media (less and less actual reporters and journalists) is it time basic journalistic principles become part of our civics curriculum? If only an informed public can be trusted with their own government (paraphrasing Jefferson) and we are dumping the responsibility to inform in the laps of the average citizen, should that citizen not have at least a rudimentary understanding of basic journalistic principles? For the longevity of the Republic, is that not more important than Chaucer or logarithms?
Some of the more forward-thinking media companies have been running community workshops on reporting, blogging, photojournalism, etc. They're doing it to train people into becoming sources of free content for them (let's not kid ourselves about motivations here), but the net effect is a good one.
Neither the news media nor the online "citizen journalists" were following basic journalistic principles in this most recent incident. Innocent people were implicated and false information was spread both by the so-called professionals (CNN, NYPost, FoxNews, etc.) and citizen journalists alike (Reddit and 4Chan primarily). While I like the idea of educating people on journalism, I doubt it would see much support in public education. Nor do I think it would keep professionals and citizen journalists from doing what they did. There will always be professional journalists who ruin it for everyone, and there is zero accountability for citizen journalism (i.e. Reddit, 4Chan, Twitter, blogs, etc.)
Unfortunately, with our current system of "Teach the kids so they can fill out the proper circle on the machine graded standardized test," we're kind of FUBAR'd when it comes to education. I don't believe that anyone has made a serious study of what kids need to know, in order to be a total citizen of the US. In part, they need to be taught critical thinking skills, at least one foreign language, cultural awareness (i.e. what things are like in other countries under different systems of government), they need to read some of the writings of the Founding Fathers (as well as those who inspired the FF) and scholarly biographies of some of the Founding Fathers, the arts, basic life skills, the sciences, and how to write software programs in at least one computer language. All of this needs to start in kindergarten and continue until they graduate. I'm sure that there's more, but without those things, then we're going to wind up with a nation of puppets, who'll dance whenever someone dangles something shiny in front of their face.
Ah! But THAT, my friend, is precisely the goal all along. Truly excellent, cutting edge education would be completely individualized, save for very specific tasks (like science projects) where collaboration was part of the education. with the current technology you could tailor the program to the abilities of every student, pushing them precisely as far as their abilities would take them, and be able to individually asses whether or not the individual student was succeeding. The standardized test would become a dinosaur. The problem is, public education is a very big and profitable business for certain powerful people - they will see to it the model never changes.
There was an interesting article in Reason last week where they talked about this a bit. It was more about the power of small groups and how they are taking on and winning against larger traditional groups. Bands of terrorists over standing armies, crowd sourcing, distributed computing, etc.. With regard to independents you can teach basic journalistic standards as part of an ethics class, but you can't make kids abide by those. So in this case I think its more important to stress the need to use credible sources when writing papers and teaching students to make sure that anything they hear is taken with a grain of salt before being accepted as the truth.
I like the idea, but I doubt it'll get any further than the ideas for making hunter's ed. a required course, or sex ed. that consists of something more than abstinence only in the entirety of the country.
I've been meaning for some time to do a thread along similar lines but with a different thrust. I need to get around to it.
News comes SO quickly and in an ever-increasing spectrum of data (cellphone, video, tweets, blogs, text messages, social media, etc.) that having a "journalist" arbitrate and package the essential data for us to digest just takes too long. It isn't like the old days when, after some newsworthy event happened, a journalist could write it up and have it for tomorrow's edition. We're all hooked into a LIVE FEED of the events as they're happening. WE are interpreting at the same time the journalist is. We often get to SEE the news occurring, as opposed to getting a second or third hand account of it from hours after the fact. We are now remote witnesses.
This^. The ability to witness events as they occur is what shortened the Vietnam War. The proliferation of cell phones in China has limited the ability of the military and local police forces to brutalize, for example, striking factory workers. Too many people capturing this on their phones and proliferating it (even with China's strict controls of its own Internet) worldwide. Witnesses with cell phones in situ during the Arab Spring. Nuff said. If "citizen journalists" can content themselves with bearing witness, brilliant. If they take it upon themselves to editorialize, what - except for the inflated salaries - differentiates them from the official Talking Heads?
Exactly. I have several friends who work for KING in Seattle. When they won the National Press Photographers Association Large Market Station of the Year two years ago, their general manager (a former photojournalist himself) was quoted in News Photographer magazine saying something along the lines of, "Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, by news time our viewers already know the basic facts of a story. It's up to us to tell or show them something that they don't already know. We have to make them care about the story." A little backstory: 20-plus years ago, Seattle was a great television market. The kind of place where quality storytelling was given top priority. Then, like many places around the country, they slid into the high story count, "flash and trash" news coverage. The stations made money, but they were putting crap on the air. Then, when social media really started to hit, the ratings started to slide because viewers weren't really interested in seeing the tabloid/trash news . KING's reaction to that was what I stated above and, so far, they're doing well. Not just in ratings, but this year they won Large Market Station of the Year again. There are a few stations and markets around the country that do quality work (Denver and Minneapolis have long histories of "doing it right"), but they're definitely outnumbered by the shitty ones. That said, there are people who try to do good work even in less than optimal surroundings. Overall, San Antonio is a pretty shitty news market but I've managed to do some good work over the last 20 years. A lot of it is in my Blue Room thread, spread out among the bitching.
I would love to see universal education in basic journalist principles because not only do we have laymen doing the actual journalism now but also we have groups like Fox which do not practice anything remotely like journalism and instead are nothing more than partisan propaganda outlets. Learning what real journalism is, what its ideals are, and how that differs from the feces mouths at Fox or talk radio would be something extremely valuable.
It's a matter of perspective. Sometimes I would want -- and presume other consumers of news would want -- as much information as possible, unfiltered. Other times, I'd want -- and presume again other consumers would want -- the news packaged in one of any number of various ways. It could be with a particular focus on my city or neighborhood. It could be with a particular style of writing. It could be with a particular viewpoint. News done in any of those ways that's done right is worth waiting for. The problem with TV news particulary IMHO is that it doesn't feel the need to wait. Even with Internet presences, there's an understanding that the newscycle in print doesn't demand the constant feeding-the-beast that TV does. And it's easier for a boss at a TV station to monitor 3-5 different channels simultaneously and be like "WHY DON'T WE HAVE X?" Well, those old days haven't existed for some time, at least in the way Iunderstand you're positing. Even prior to TV news, radio could give the up-to-the-minute coverage that would make people essentially remote witnesses. TV would break into regular programming to show key events happening live. It just used to be that there were fewer channels for that to happen. So while in the 60s, live coverage would happen for things like JFK's assassination and the moon landing, now it happens for relatively minor stuff like OJ's slow-speed chase or the Tot Mom trial. I think it's a difference in consumer mindsets and habits. We want instant gratification far more than previous generations did, and TV and Internet news can give it to us more and more. To the extent that any pundit has accountability -- both in the positive and negative senses -- one who is an official Talking Head probably has more than a person off the street. They also have presumably more on-the-job training and staffs helping them process and present information.
Reading the responses to this, I can't help but draw comparisons to the sports broadcasts on NHL trade deadline day. On that day, it's like flying monkeys invade the broadcast booth and rumors, no matter how untrustworthy or unconfirmed, are reported. Sources are usually from Twitter. TSN usually holds off on announcing anything until it's been confirmed. And because of this, most people will say "I'll wait for the TSN confirmation." What this does is separates the news stations into two different groups. There are the rumor mongers, and there are the companies that report the actual news. The rumor mongers are really the same thing as Twitter, and eventually, people are going to see them as such. It gets ratings, but at the expense of people not really relying on that particular station for trustworthy news. I imagine a lot of news stations have egg on their faces after the Boston fiasco. Now they have to decide whether they want to go for the ratings or establish credibility as a news source.
