Marketplace

is it no surprise that this was dreamed up by a professor in college? those who can do those who cant teach those who might be able to are called amateurs.

i think this week i will try to be a citizen dentist. open wide jagow.

I’m a former public radio reporter who left the field and now works in finance.  In an ideal world, I’d keep my day job but lend my journalism skills in my free time — maybe put together one solid feature length story a month pro bono.

The problem is newsrooms don’t seem set up to accommodate somebody in my position. They’re not used to it.  In the future that will have to change.  As more full time reporters jump ship or are pushed out, there will be too much unused talent for editors and news directors to pass up.

First let me say that I really can’t stand the movement that everybody can do everything, just by watching a video or taking an accelerated, hyped-up course (Full Sail offerings come to mind). I’m all for continuing education, and realize not everyone can afford formal schooling. But please don’t watch a handful of videos and think of yourself as an expert.

All that being said, I think we as the audience have taken for granted that the people who wrote the articles in our printed newspaper are actually journalists. We just assume that, because we also assume that the newspaper company that is publishing the paper hires only qualified, educated staff members. So, by default, the story writers are qualified.

The potential problem with all online news is not that people will miss holding the paper, but that the lines between a blogger representing the audience, a citizen journalist, and a professional highly trained journalist are all now really really blurry. Going back to my point about taking newspaper journalists for granted, it becomes obvious now that we can’t just assume a writer is “qualified” just because they have a website. Yet we need to know if they are, so that we can continually distinguish what is an onlooker’s opinion and what is hard facts thoroughly researched and vetted.

When you add to the mix the increasingly easy ability to have a website design/theme that looks more like a professional corporate website and less like a teenage blog/diary, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish who is who writing the “news”.

I’m not saying that the non-professionals should not have a place to speak their mind. I’m just saying, there should be disclosure and honesty, so we know the difference when we are reading the web.