{"id":4888,"date":"2006-01-20T13:00:52","date_gmt":"2006-01-20T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4888"},"modified":"2006-01-20T13:00:52","modified_gmt":"2006-01-20T13:00:52","slug":"journalists-still-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4888","title":{"rendered":"journalists still matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve come from Ohio to New York City for a meeting on “Media and Communications at the Crossroads: The Role of Scholarship for Media Justice and Reform.” At the meeting, my friend Lew Friedland<\/a> just argued that daily news journalism is still essential to the “media ecology.” I’d put the argument as follows:<\/p>\n

It’s true that people get news, ideas, and values from their family and friends and from multiple electronic sources, including the web portals of Yahoo and other Internet-service providers (which are regular news sources for 15% of young people); comedy TV (a regular source for 21% of youth); and talk radio (16%). (See this Pew Research Center poll<\/a>.) However, Yahoo’s headlines simply come from wire services–hence, from reporters. Comedy writers get most of their material from daily newspapers. Friedland estimates that 90% of the news stories on local TV come from a local newspaper. Debates in the blogosphere are very often triggered by reported news. Fictional programs like “Law and Order” are inspired by print journalism. Therefore, influential conversations in the kitchen, the office water-cooler, and church often derive ultimately from a newspaper.<\/p>\n

If this is right, then we cannot consider citizen media and other new means of communication and discussion in isolation. They are dependent on the state of conventional, professional journalism–which isn’t good. Newspapers are highly profitable but are cutting their staff and budgets for reporting. Two thirds of national journalists believe that bottom-line pressure is hurting news coverage–causing the press to avoid complex issues, to be sloppy, and to be timid. (Source.)<\/a> Bloggers can complain about newspaper journalists from various angles; they can’t replace them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve come from Ohio to New York City for a meeting on “Media and Communications at the Crossroads: The Role of Scholarship for Media Justice and Reform.” At the meeting, my friend Lew Friedland just argued that daily news journalism is still essential to the “media ecology.” I’d put the argument as follows: It’s true […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}