This is partly the fault, as so much is these days, of “academizing” what used to be a trade. Rather than apprenticeships as part of a career track that includes writing obituaries and covering boring town meetings, journalism and communications are now undergraduate majors. These departments and programs crank out young people with little knowledge about the subjects of their correspondence. They are schooled in the structure of a story but not in the habits or norms of the profession. Many of them, accustomed to posting their deep thoughts online since high school, do not understand the difference between “journalism” and “blogging.” Veteran journalists, meanwhile, are being pushed out of newsrooms to make room for the youngsters who know how to generate clicks, as The Nation writer Dale Maharidge described in 2016. Old-school journalism was a trade, and legacy journalists find today’s brand of personality journalism, with its emphasis on churning out blog posts, aggregating the labor of others, and curating a constant social-media presence, to be simply foreign. And the higher-ups share the new bias. One editor of a major national publication, who himself is well over 40, confided to me that he’s reluctant to hire older journalists, that “they’re stuck in the mentality of doing one story a week” and not willing to use social media. The market’s focus on form rather than content, the need for speed, and the fashionable biases of the modern university combine to create a trifecta of misinformation. Little wonder that experienced writers like Joel Engel, an author and former New York Times and Los Angeles Times journalist, have lamented that America was better served “when ‘journalists’ were reporters who’d often barely graduated high school.”
Interesting excerpt I’ve read about journalism. This book was published in 2017 and the sentiment is probably even more true today. The way most of us acquire and consume news today is definitely very different than that of just 1 or 2 decades ago.
Headlines of many information are almost required to have certain key words to generate clicks. Opinion driven headlines are also a lot more appealing to people. This is just the reality of the market though. The internet has really democratised the tools of communication and press and news companies no longer hold the monopoly on information dissemination.
In this book, the author shares more about how we can combat misinformation. Ultimately, it is down to us, the consumers, to develop the interest in combating misinformation. We also have to be open-minded to new information, even if it goes against our beliefs. If we don’t change, then natural economic incentives will make it difficult for change to happen.
