Comment Re:Hello, I am a professional journalist (Score 3, Insightful) 388
I'll address the Objectivity thing. Ok, here's two scenarios:
Print media - Writer and editor let a story slide through with factual errors (IE: most of FOX news). 20 years ago, how would anyone know? Unless we had direct knowledge of the facts, most people would not know the difference. Newspapers at the time were the equivalent of a deaf man on a soapbox yelling at people. One way communication that the majority of people had to take as the truth, regardless of the actual facts.
Online media - Writer and editor let a story slide through with factual errors - The Internet collectively calls bullshit and the writer/editor/blog is discredited. The truth makes it out in the time it takes to type it in. We see it every-single-day. A piece of news becomes a discussion and the truth is generally revealed for all. News is reported, investigated, vetted, buried in peat moss and dug back up before being framed for all to see. This is the advantage of the on-line media and one of the reasons I think print media is scared as hell. They can and have been called out on hidden agendas and sloppy reporting.
Journalism is not dead, just your ability to be the lord high gods of information traffic. I don't mourn it.
Mot of your comments above boil down to "You can't trust bloggers, they might be sleestak, but you can trust us, cause we're not sleestaks."
If all print media disappears tomorrow, thousands of other sources will spring up in it's place. It's time to close up the buggy shop and learn to make cars.