Reading Response #4

1. Since the 1980’s, the news media has changed not only its mediums, but also its entire model. For instance, the television news new to the ‘80s that Neil Postman described as “fragmented news…without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore, without essential seriousness” has been replaced by the even more immediate news outlet of the Internet (Postman 100). Now, not only have the traditional professionalism and news values of auditory and visual news been corrupted and condensed, but even the written word has been reduced to barebones in order to keep the ever shortening attention span of the reader. Needless to say, Postman would be endlessly cynical about the current day as he was about his own era; what he recognized about the transformation of television news in his own day was only a very small-scale version of what the Internet brings to the table. Television, he said, consists of fragmented news that “will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal” (Postman 104). Imagine what he would make of the many ads and distractions that plague the Internet, especially considering the fact that the viewer can simply click away with their attention span.

2. Citizen journalism’s advantages lie mostly in its expansion of journalism as a whole. For example, in the past, journalism relied entirely on a staff of editors deciding what limited number of stories would be brought to the public’s attention. It also relied on the journalists themselves being able to get a hold of certain information and/or media. Now, the public has access to an unlimited amount of stories, all of which they can view from a vast variety of different points of view and angles covered by different people. They also have access to facts and/or photos or other media that citizens affiliated in some way with a story were able to capture that no one else has. There will always be a gap in quality between the two; lots of citizen journalism is poorly written, features enough bull-headed opinion to drive readers away, and is, overall, sloppy in its delivery and because of this, professional journalism will always exist and have a home. It is simply evolving to rely more on give-and-take between the professionals and the general public. As Clay Shirky states in Here Comes Everybody, “the primary distinction between the two groups is gone. What once was a chasm has now become a mere slope” (Shirky 77).

3. While “Journey to the End of the Coal” is not top-level professional journalism in a traditional since, largely because it does not feature eyewitness accounts and quotes from real life people and relies on a fictionally structured maze to hammer home its point, it is on par with the New York Times article “Graft in China Covers Up Toll of Coal Mines” about the same topic in that by engaging the reader in making the decisions to solve the case it presents, “Journey to the End of the Coal” offers a much more interactive inside look at the issue at hand. It is the citizen journalism that Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody to the New York Times’s professional journalism because it pulls in the lesser attention spans of today’s media consumer more effectively than traditional print media and implants its message just as effectively.