We have talked about what makes news "news" and what makes a journalist a "journalist." We also have learned that facts need to be verified with several sources. What we haven't discussed is how technology is being used in reporting the "news."
Before you launch into this discussion, spend some time finding out how journalists are using email, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and other tools like these to gather and disseminate information.
Also review how they're using these tools to package the news by reviewing Chapter 4 in Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive -- particularly pages 47-51 on crowdsourcing the news -- and "Backpack Journalism Is Here To Stay" in the Online Journalism Review.
Then listen to this Newsday reporter explain how he uses technologies in his reporting:
There's lots being demanded of journalists. Where once print journalists didn't even have to type all their own stories-"Get me rewrite!"-now they must be reporter, cameraman, soundman, editor, blogger and even the producer of their work:
These technologies have accelerated the news cycle. They also have made news consumers news producers, which has raised some serious questions about appropriate methods of newsgathering:
Journalists now must curate all the many crowd-sourced streams of news and information even as they're adding their own text, still photos, audio, video and infographics. The instantaneous nature of this news ecosystem means factual errors are inevitable, which we learned the hard way when National Public Radio set off a chain of misreporting in 2011 by mistakenly declaring an Arizona congresswoman had died in a mass shooting.
Journalists also have been duped, sometimes by memes as in the case of the fake Hurricane Sandy photos...
... and sometimes deliberately as in the Reutersgate scandal...
Mistakes in handling the overwhelming and often conflicting amounts of information can only exacerbate the public's lack of confidence in the U.S. media's ability to report "the news fully, accurately, and fairly," which Gallup says is at an all-time low. It brings to mind a comment made by the legendary CBS correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, in a 1958 speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, which you can listen to here:
"The speed of communications is wonderful to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue."
Our integrity is everything in this business. Yet even someone as well known as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has blamed technology for trapping her into unwitting plagiarism. There is no doubt the new media have disrupted the old:
So, is this increasing reliance on technology compromising the professionalism of the news process that the U.S. news media have worked so hard to build after the rise of yellow journalism?
Draw conclusions! Let us know if a story based on an interview conducted by email is good or bad; whether reporters should treat published news stories as primary resources; how reporters should react to a Twitter tip; what kind of Web information would be credible enough for a reporter to use; how the AP manual says we can use social networking websites; whether speed or accuracy should still be the main goal of Web 2.0 journalists, etc.
Grab some aspect of this topic and make it your own! But please do not tackle this discussion prompt until you have reviewed this week's assigned readings.