The New Journalists

Few documentaries in the past years have examined a new trend in journalism: the layman as reporter, the pedestrian with a cell phone camera and texting ability. A major story breaks, and within minutes, the average joe or jane on the street has uploaded text or images to CNN. Frankly, this has Cat worried, and not just because her parents shelled out a lot of money on journalism school.

The problem is that in the age of Twitter and camera phones, which send text or pics to news organizations instantly, there is no guarantee that the info will be accurate or, even more importantly, have any context. Yesterday, CNN itself grabbed a radio transmission from a Coast Guard training exercise on the Potomac River and believed it had intercepted evidence of terrorist activity. Flights in and out of D.C. were temporarily shut down on the anniversary of 9/11. CNN's failure to adequately check out the story caused a lot of grief and was unprofessional. If a major news network commits this error, how much more are everyday "citizen journalists" likely to make even worse errors?

PBS's Frontline did a series on the new age of journalism, and much of it was rather sobering. The trend is apparently a fait accompli, and yet too many people do not have the slightest knowledge of journalistic standards. Information is obtained, but there is no thought given to the who, what, where, when, and why that gives a story legs.

Professional journalists are trained in writing, ethics, sources, corroboration, legalities, the history of the craft, and much more. Therein lies the heart of the problem: journalism is a craft that takes years to learn and master. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, journalism has become the province of people with blogs and iPhones. Online news services are especially open to receiving info from the average citizen, although such services--AOL, Yahoo, and the rest--are sometimes prone to throwing out random information like someone throwing objects against a wall to see what sticks.

How we gather and process information is critical in a new age of technology in which paradigm shifts in culture, social mores, and politics seem to change with every twenty-four hour news cycle. You have a great pic taken with your phone? Great, but here's the conundrum. Is the photo of a man falling through the air, arms flung wide, a picture of a man jumping from a building or jumping on a trampoline. The angle of the shot means everything since the man's facial expression may be quite deceptive.

We live in an age where we believe what we see and are told without question. If it's "out there," it must be true. Now more than ever, however, we need to engage in analysis of the information we're fed. And that, my friends, is the job of the journalist. Blog discussion is healthy, but it's not necessarily news. You heard it from Cat.