Tuesday, February 4, 2014

What is Journalism Anyway?


    Journalism is hard to define, anyone can say that. When trying to think of what it is nowadays you have so many definitions spitting out at you that you are frazzled and you can't really find a clear answer. All I can do is write, read, and accept what I think is journalism. Sometimes that means not everybody is going to agree with my perspective and personal view on journalism.

    I used to think of journalists as those people from the early 1900's to the 1960's with the professional suit, the popular press hat, little notepad, short little pencil, with the cigarette in the mouth. In movies the journalists are always in groups shouting the same questions or different ones at the same time and if they don't get their answer, what do they do? They lie. They make a headline that has everyone buzzing in town and the character who has this made up story about them in the papers is furious and it all connects with the storyline- for the movie. (In many ways Hollywood has influenced how people think of journalism today.)

    Never though did I think journalism was all about just making up stories. Journalism can be informative, it can also be a story from the journalists perspective (I think). The general definition of journalism is the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or broadcasting news on the radio or television. Most of the time though we are so critical of people's writing especially when we form an opinion, but Robert Niles on his website says that publishing your opinion on whatever it is you are, is an okay thing to do.

    On this What is Journalism? website that puts you right to sleep, it never mentions anything about an opinion only about news and feature stories, and the tools of journalism. If you think about it though, who wants to read a stale and bias story, but I may not always agree with the writer and I may get mad or frustrated with the writer even if we are not engaged in a conversation. So, it comes to now is forming your opinion journalism... can you?

    For so long we have been hearing that journalism has nothing to do with bias, but journalists do it anyway. Anywhere you read you read, you read some form of bias, but we need to be loyal in our writing. We have a duty to tell the truth, Loyalty+Unbias=journalism. It's hard though! Super hard to make unbias and telling the truth come together because if we don't agree with what we are writing then why are we writing it? We got assigned it, we couldn't think of anything else... the list of excuses goes on.

    Like I said before I can only accepted what I think is journalism. We are all going to have opinions on what journalism is, and we could have days and days of discussion on it because it's sadly one of those things in our world today that gets influenced by people. People can think the paparazzi are doing journalism by stalking celebrities when really it isn't, that's just annoying probably.




1 comment:

  1. Good job of using your links to support specific information. It might help to rethink the your fifth paragraph.

    ReplyDelete