Week 2: Carey and Ford

Monica Miller

In Catherine Ford’s article, What Society Requires is Reputable Journalism, she argues that journalism does not exist only through newspaper or the printed word. The decline, or “death” of newspapers is not the end of news. Journalism is changing and becoming more electronic, instant, and individualized. There are both positive and negative aspects to this change. While newspapers are “on the way out”, as Michael Kinsley wrote, Ford explains that they offer a timeless way to store information. Digitally, storing options are a little more risky because technological advances are being discovered so rapidly. As seen with floppy disks, the improvements in technology make retrieving information on outdated devices increasingly more difficult over time.

Newspapers are also more established than the internet.They come with a reputation. Whether that reputation is good or bad, people know what they’re getting from certain publications. The internet is still an unknown. It is true that with journalism on the internet, information is becoming far more individualized as well. The unlimited possibilities allow for very focused interests which makes it easy for a reader to ignore everything else. For example, if I was really interested in professional sports, I could strictly visit websites that offered the information I wanted to read about and I could go a long time without really knowing what’s happening in the rest of the world. With newspapers, there is a wide array of information for a more balanced education and therefore, more of an opportunity for an individualistic reader to branch out.

James Carey first writes in The Dark Continent of American Journalism an introduction to the basics of writing a successful journalistic piece. An article should answer the who, what, where, when and why of the subject. Carey also discusses the state of daily journalism in America and offers critiques such as, the daily news  isn’t thorough enough and the timetable to share the news is so short that it can lead to mis-information and inaccurate reports.

Daily journalism struggles to answer the “how” and “why” of a story, but instead offers a quick rundown of the facts, for the most part. With journalism more instant than ever because of the internet, journalists want the recognition as the first person to break a big story. Especially in sports journalism, the accuracy of a story is sometimes sacrificed for speed. That certainly is a major problem with instantaneous news from websites like twitter and facebook.