Saturday, November 19, 2011
The woes of modern journalism
This is an interview with an award-winning journalist before he came to Bratislava to give a talk (which it is now too late to catch unfortunately). What do you think of his assessment of the current state of journalism? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of the digital age in terms of information gathering. Is modern technology causing people to have shorter attention spans and be shocked less easily? How can we encourage quality journalism and in-depth coverage so that the public can be better informed?
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I am not a very media-oriented person. I prefer not to read newspapers or watch television and I rarely listen to the radio because I do not really enjoy the music they play. However, I still have a rough idea of what is going on in the world. This is because, just as Joshua Friedman stated, nowadays everyone can be a journalist, and thus everyone is a walking source of information.
ReplyDeleteAnother idea this journalist mentioned, which I also agree with, is that the stories aren’t as prepared as before. Just as he said, in this age we can easily access millions of different media sources from diverse countries that cover stories from different points of view. While this is interesting to observe and it creates the impression that we have so much more information, the truth is that now we just have the same story from different points of view. However, since the journalists do not have the opportunity to devote themselves to the stories, the information we obtain can easily be limited and thus, under the illusion that we know what is happening, we are actually blind to the whole picture.
A second issue stems from this excess of information. People have become more “numb” to stories. Things that surprised generations before us do not have such an effect on us anymore because we hear of such news so much more often. We are surrounded by all this new information that is just being jammed into our minds all at once, on the radio in the morning, on the internet at school or work, in the newspapers, plastered on billboards, and constantly streaming in television. Consequently, it is impossible to keep up with everything so we just catch bits and pieces. In such a way, I think that people do not usually submerge themselves completely in one specific area because they still want to be aware of all the other pieces of information that are flying by. And it’s not just about the journalism anymore. It’s the main dilemma; would you rather know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little?
All this information is just drifting in the air around us and we are breathing it to survive. I sometimes get the feeling that now people are addicted to constantly knowing about everything. No wonder the age we are currently living in has been dubbed the Information Age.