lunes, 28 de marzo de 2011

You are not journalists, and I’m not an architect for building a cabin

Anyone can inform, but not everyone knows how to do a piece of news. In the recent years has been a huge increase of the tools that Internet offers us to inform instantly of what is going on in our environment.  What is called civic journalism is an excellent tool for professional journalists to get deeper information and other points a view of the news they are covering. Earthquakes and Tsunami’s videos broadcasted by an average Joe helps a lot to complete journalist’s information. Civic journalism has been essential in the Arabian and Saharan uprisings, since in many cases no journalists were allowed to get to the centre of the revolts. News are about people, so what they contribute with will be always helpful. Testimonies are what makes something news. But, watch out! Giving a testimony is not making a piece of news.

Many people, who surely aren’t much familiarized with the Journalism’s field, say that nowadays anyone can be a journalist, and the University degree on it isn’t necessary anymore. Well, as I said before, anyone can inform, but not everyone knows what is important and worth informing about, in order to make the public agenda or to analyze the environment in which something is taking place. The average Joe doesn’t know the background of what he is informing. Of course there are many journalist who limit to write a piece of news taking only the agencies’ information, but even to write a new in that way a technique must be learned to know how inform clearly and objectively. Not anyone knows how to write a headline, or an nformative sms, it’s difficult to get the proper words. Nevertheless, the good journalist will be the one who, apart from writing a good piece of news knows how to do a good report of it, since he will know perfectly the subject he is talking about. 



So not everyone can be a journalist. Journalism degree is important, journalist won’t die, because if so the information’s agenda and organization will die with them, and we need it. We need information to be organized and analyzed, and that only can be done by journalists, the good ones. What have already died are gatekeepers, since information isn’t filtered by the media anymore, we can know almost everything we want to know thanks to the Internet, but we need a captain in to sale trough this vast ocean of information.  Let’s ask for the better one.

2 comentarios:

  1. I see your point, in fact, I think that everyone can comment and have a critic on any topic but that, doesn't make anyone a journalist. Investing one hour of your time commenting something seems to be enough to criticize a whole degree; while people that actually study journalism invest 8 hours per day providing information (and also the texts that those people comment).

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  2. very good post. Very interesting point you defend. I couldn't agree more with Image's Closet (Paula). As we saw today in class, first of all we are communicators, then journalists. All journalists are communicators, but not all communicators can be called journalists.

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