Stop the Press Releases!
As newspapers recruit "citizen journalists" to fill their pages, flacks and hacks find an opening.
it's easy to see why a local newspaper editor could fall in love with Stacey N. Getz: She's a summa cum laude Florida State graduate, a twentysomething public-relations executive with the gift of gab and the face of a sorority president. When the Tallahassee Democrat combed the community in early 2007 for residents whose blogs and articles could fill out the paper's local coverage, Getz, a new-media whiz, was one of the first to jump aboard.
Getz's Let's Talk Tallahassee blog is a paean to civic boosterism, inviting readers to submit ideas to help business leaders and developers improve the city. "I've found plenty of great reasons to live here. But I'm still not completely satisfied," Getz wrote, "so I'm asking you for help." Her blog was so successful that the Gannett-owned Democrat (a newspaper I once worked for) "reverse published" many of its posts—along with Getz's photo, in color, whenever possible—as articles in its metro section.
Continues Below
Continued From Above
One of Getz's topics was the city's ambitious plan to convert its downtown area into an arts district, which hit resistance when the Democrat reported that city officials were entertaining a proposal to erect a Wal-Mart there. "I don't know what it is about that place, but the mere mention of the name turns some otherwise reasonable people into illogical lunatics," she wrote in a blog post that the Democrat reprinted. "At least take a moment to consider the city's line of thought."
It wasn't the first time Getz had urged readers to calmly consider the pluses of urban development. But this time she was asking them to give a fair shake to a former client. According to the website of CoreMessage, the PR firm she works for, the young executive led an "award-winning legislative, grassroots and media campaign" for the big-box corporation in 2005, spearheading an effort to repeal Florida's fuel-price controls so that Wal-Mart could undercut local gas-station prices. Neither she nor the Democrat disclosed this. Getz still sees no conflict of interest. "We're kind of off and on with them," she told me of her firm's relationship with the chain. When she blogged about the downtown plan, "at that point, we weren't working with Wal-Mart, and I wasn't being paid to talk about them or put them in a positive light."
As newspapers' circulation numbers and ad revenues free-fall, their executives have decided that publications must go "hyper-local" and online, and they've enlisted the help of amateurs such as Getz to do it. But as her Wal-Mart plug shows, the newspaper industry's embrace of "citizen journalism" has a downside. Reader-submitted content rarely gets vetted by editors. In the same month as Getz's Wal-Mart post, the Democrat published a story by a retirement home's development director about the complex's great new golf course—without disclosing her job—and a woman wrote an article about a boy who'd organized a cancer charity event without noting that she's his mom. This may sound like small-time stuff, but it exemplifies the self-defeating side effects of newspapers' new strategy for survival.
Call it the second phase of the usa Today-ification of the press; after all, the media empire that gave us the McPaper is now setting newspapers' online agenda. "Gannett is about local, local content," declared Chairman Craig Dubow shortly after taking control of usa Today's parent company in 2006. The company's 85 dailies have since doubled the amount of local news in their pages. Content has become "platform agnostic"—making print and online versions interchangeable. The chain's newsrooms were rechristened "information centers" and reporters became "mojos"—mobile journalists who shoot their own photos and videos (badly, it turns out) and post them to the web without editing. Long-form and investigative stories were replaced by short, searchable bursts of information.
The corollary of the shorter-faster-more plan was crowdsourcing: enlisting unpaid citizen journalists like Getz to fill the local-content hole. The Tallahassee Democrat's website now features reader-written blogs on topics ranging from Florida State football rumors to "trashology"—ruminations on poor, white, rural living authored by one "Miss Trashahassee." The print edition now includes a smorgasbord of reader-submitted content such as "HomeRoom," a page of school news generated by parents and school administrators. Rather than freeing up time for reporters to cover important stories, the new model often means simply laying off salaried pros and putting the squeeze on whoever survives the cuts. As Ryan Sholin, a new-media blogger, writes, "It's hard for lifelong newsroom types to see layoffs one day and reader participation initiatives the next and not feel a bit slighted."
The wave of journalistic outsourcing has some new-media advocates hailing the death of the "fortress newsroom" mentality and touting the beginning of an era where newspapers not only listen to their readers but invite them into the inner sanctum. "In fortress newsroom, readers are something of a necessary inconvenience. We need their business, but not their ideas," writes Steve Smith, editor of Spokane's Spokesman-Review. Smith and other citizen-journalism boosters are fond of repeating the mantra of Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People and the director of the Center for Citizen Media: "Our readers know more than we do."
But if the elitist fortress-newsroom mentality held John Q. Public at arm's length, it also kept PR flacks and unqualified hacks out of the newsroom. By forcing their beleaguered staffs to depend on outsiders for content, then running the content without much editorial oversight, newspapers may be taken in by crackpots and sly marketers who make Jayson Blair look like a grade-school plagiarist. Lobbyists and spin doctors have already taken notice of the new model. Take the South Dakota Politics and Daschle V. Thune blogs, which influenced the Gannett-owned Sioux Falls Argus Leader's coverage of the state's 2004 United States Senate race; eventually, the bloggers were found to be on the payroll of just-elected Republican Senator John Thune. "Got a story you can't convince a mainstream reporter to run?" wrote Chris Suellentrop in Slate. "Leak it anonymously to a blog on your payroll. Then get a local reporter to write a story on the controversial, gossipy, local political blog. Soon everyone in town will be talking about the story you leaked to the blog.... And no one will know that the blog post was a paid placement until after the election."
But why bother with costly Astroturf blogs when it's never been easier to get the instant aura of legitimacy that comes from getting your story printed in a newspaper—or on its website? Of course, that aura of legitimacy is diminished as newspapers replace reported news with unmediated—and sometimes unreliable—information. Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder and a news junkie, has expressed his concern about the "increasing disinformation" in citizen journalism. "The problem is that with blogging, the model is publish first, maybe fact-check later," he told pbs's Frontline in 2006. "In newspapers, the model is you fact-check first and then publish. But those models are merging."
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen says that newspapers should be more diligent in fact-checking their blogs. But Rosen (a proponent of journalistic crowdsourcing with whom I tangled over Mother Jones' July/August 2007 package, "Politics 2.0") and other advocates of Journalism 2.0 say newspaper professionals must embrace new media's open participation and freewheeling discourse. Doc Searls, a programmer and new-media writer based at the University of California-Santa Barbara, agrees. "The key challenge is to reframe the newspaper business as one that happens in a wide-open, networked world," he says, "not as a print business that happens to do some stuff on the web." Rosen says the critics of Gannett-style crowdsourcing are out of touch. As he told me, "The curmudgeon class has its answer: Bitch about it!"
Cut me a slice of curmudgeon pie, please. If you could convince me that crowdsourcing and mojos and information centers weren't about cost cutting or lazy journalism, I'd be all for them. The blogosphere and the 24/7 news cycle are realities, and editors and reporters have a lot of ink-stained baggage to dump if they want to thrive in the new-media world. But that doesn't mean that bean-counting publishers must recruit mercenary bloggers or convert their cub reporters into untrained, overworked, self-editing news tickers.
The only thing newspapers still have going for them is their reputation for telling the truth, going deep, and reporting good stories. Bring on enough Stacey Getzes and you'll destroy the brand name newspapers have built up over the last century even faster than the Internet can do it on its own. This brave new world requires more work by newspaper publishers and editors, not less. There's a place for reader blogs and community participation in the 21st-century newspaper, but let's not kid ourselves that they are a substitute for what people look for in their morning paper. As Stacey Getz readily admits about her blog, "This is not true journalism."
Comments
Citizen journalism--when it is actually journalism by citizens--works precisely because it operates outside of agenda-driven gatekeepers. When you don't have advertisers or a corporate overlord deciding what you publish, it's a lot easier to get the real story.
Hiring non-professional bloggers to write for a professional paper, however, defeats this. It both removes the potential for corporation-free reporting and unnecessarily legitimizes amateurs.
A far better solution is to go the other way around: Making more real journalism available online. Not via trend-bandwagon blogging, but by transferring traditional journalism skills and processes--including editing--to this new medium.
The resistance by many traditional journalists to online news production has destroyed their ability to actually do their job: informing the public. If an increasingly smaller percentage of the population is getting their news from traditional sources, the purpose of traditional journalism is failing. The public still needs the information, but they're getting it from unreliable sources.
The Web is a vast sea of information and it desperately needs REAL journalism, both reporting and editing. But the more the people who are trained to do this run away from it merely because of a platform change, the more the public is getting screwed.
Whether newshole space is measured in airtime, column inches or pixels is irrelevant. What matters is the content that goes in that space. And real journalists need to be the ones developing that content.
Any blogger who does what Stacey Getz apparently did risks severe damage to his or her reputation. That's the beauty of an unfettered conversation. It's hard to get away with deception for very long because if the story is important enough, the real truth will be found out. It may pay to lie in the short term, but the risks are high. When everyone is able to contribute to the base of knowledge, then the quality of information actually improves. Misinformation is quickly outed.
The problems cited in this article are the result of newspapers desperately trying to find a survival strategy as their business crumbles around them. These problems are not a weakness of citizen journalism, they are a weakness of a hybrid model in which supposedly credible institutions give license to selected citizens without checking their facts. Take the newspaper out of this equation and Stacey Getz is just another blogger who has to convince people to read her because her information is credible and her opinions interesting.
What citizen journalism allows is usually a mountain of trite, fluff news with little substance, and therefore little actual news value, and a (hopefully) lower overhead. It does not allow what the phrase "citizen journalism" suggests, an actual empowerment of the people, by the people. What gets a boost is corporate shareholders' pocketbooks.
Before its rush to grab whatever user-generated content it could because it was "good writing," the Tallahassee Democrat should have checked Getz's background out a bit better. Do they really think someone working for a p.r. firm would be an objective "citizen journalist" in her spare time? oh, let's not be so naieve!
For some reason, newspapers seem to be forgetting that if you aren't paying for something, and you're not vetting it, you just might get something that's a *tad* slanted. When people are doing various "citizen" projects, on their own time and for little renumeration, it's usually because they have their own notions about issues in their community and want to, perhaps, gather some support for those notions. Yes, many cit j. sites have particular viewpoints, and if you live in an area, you can figure out where those viewpoints are coming from. Sometimes those viewpoints are indeed the ones *not* expressed in the local paper.
Newspapers should, perhaps, stop looking at the "popularity" factor--or maybe consider that the reason a blog might be popular is not necessarily because the writing is good or that it's unbiased, but that it's popular because the writer has a certain personality and is writing in a way that echoes popular opinion. In other words, some citizen journalists are more like the busybodies who're starting conversations, not necessarily the observers reporting on the facts.
I'll buy the advisability of "citizen journalists" at newspapers the day the corporate overlords install "citizen publishers," "citizen editors," "citizen press operators" and "citizen ad reps" in all their properties. Which is to say, never.
Hey, it's 'equal time', monopoly-buster on the propaganda farms, good stuff, I think...get some conflicting opinions out there, if you don't like it, go to aol.com or something...whatever you do, don't think for yourself or ask questions...or you'll become one of THEM...
You've got it completely backwards. Citizen journalists are necessary because they provide what people look for in their morning papers but rarely find - news which affects the LARGEST NUMBER OF PEOPLE in the MOST SERIOUS LIFE-AND-DEATH WAYS. You can read such real news at my site: www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org for one example. But don't let me challenge you. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this month, how about you let Dr. King challenge you, you and all mainstream news media too. See if you can take to heart the words he spoke only 4 days before he was gunned down:
KING'S CHALLENGE
"FIRST, WE ARE CHALLENGED TO DEVELOP A WORLD PERSPECTIVE. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood. . . . Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. . .
WE ARE CHALLENGED TO RID OUR NATION AND THE WORLD OF POVERTY. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I've seen it in Latin America; I've seen it in Africa; I've seen this poverty in Asia. . .How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God's children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred
thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India's population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of
them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.
AS I NOTICED THESE THINGS, SOMETHING WITHIN ME CRIED OUT, "CAN WE IN AMERICA STAND IDLY BY AND NOT BE CONCERNED?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. . .Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. . .this is America's opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have
the will. In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People's Campaign. . . We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. . . yes, it will be a Poor People's Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
AMERICA HAS NOT MET ITS OBLIGATIONS AND ITS RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE POOR. One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we've done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power. It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That's the
question facing America today."
(The full text of Dr. King's sermon entitled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" containing the above quotes can be read here:
http://tinyurl.com/82npj. Dr. King delivered it at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968, and you can listen to two audio excerpts of the sermon at that same link.)
Today, forty years after Dr. King gave that speech, 41 percent of humanity still defecate in the streets because they have no access to sanitation, one-quarter are forced to live without electricity, and 30,000 kids DIE UNNECESSARILY EACH DAY (see my website listed below for the proof, along with an article about the statistical accuracy of such numbers generally here: http://tinyurl.com/yttp3s ). If you are
indeed up for King's challenge, you'll need to seek out that world perspective he spoke about and get the real front page news on your own, because news which affects the largest number of people in the most serious ways is only rarely covered by television shows and newspapers!! My website, www.WhatNewsShouldBe.com , is one of the
places you can find it. It's only when information concerning the most pressing issues facing humanity is widely known that the needless death and suffering can be stopped. Since mainstream news rarely speaks to this, it is Citizen Journalists that we must seek out for ourselves. There is enough for everyone: http://tinyurl.com/ytmfd3 . Please pass it on. Thank you and Happy
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!
Angie
www.WhatNewsShouldBe.com
Great article. Blogging is picking up steam and is carving out a place of its own in the world of journalism.
Blogging gives momentum to writers to write about their interests. It also shows that there is an audience for just about anything. Thanks for writing such a positive story.
Adam is dead-on in his criticism of what the Democrat has become. But it's not the concept of citizen journalism that is bad, it's the fact that newspapers are cutting staff to the point that there aren't enough hands on deck to check the facts of "stories/columns" that are reverse published. It's one thing to put that stuff on a Web site, but the Democrat was going overboard in printing blogs in the paper. As a former sports editor there, we also had people e-mailing in stories on events that had a very limited audience but we were required to print them anyway.
There was no editiorial judgment being displayed -- just editor Bob Gabordi's demand to do things his way.
At one point I wanted to finish my career in Tallahassee, but now I'm glad I left while I still had my sanity.
Your article has a point, for consumers of "news". But if you are the 5 companies who own the media the concern is to provide content at the lowest cost to people who will shell out $ for it. Quality is not part of the equation.
Citizen journalism can be useful. My concern is the ability and willingness for corporations to usurp citizen journalism as a way to advance their views (in much the same way they've already done with nearly all print, TV and radio media.) As we learned with Stacey Getz, it's not very difficult to a corporation to create a 'grass roots campaign' to fool people into thinking it is an authentic, citizen-driven cause. And from what authority do I speak? I recently left a career in which I did just this. I urge you to consider the source, however well-hidden it is.
Dang, y'all got some mighty fine arguments, y'all do. Reckon I am gonna have to own up to my true vocation now that yall done busted everboddy and everything. When I ain't doin my real "real" job, i'm out trash-huntin for treasure. Sometimes I keep it and sometimes I use stuff for gifts. If it's something really special, like a Hager Twins (from Hee Haw) album, I keep it for myself.
And what's all this about "citizen journalism"? Ain't that against the law if you ain't got no degree? Do certainly you don't know me because I don't wanna go to jail no more since that last time. OK? OK. Thank you.
This citizen journalist just needed help with formatting. Here it is again, this time with paragraph breaks that display hopefully:
--------------
You've got it completely backwards. Citizen journalists are necessary because they provide what people look for in their morning papers but rarely find - news which affects the LARGEST NUMBER OF PEOPLE in the MOST SERIOUS LIFE-AND-DEATH WAYS. You can read such real news at my site: www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org for one example.
But don't let me challenge you. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this month, how about you let Dr. King challenge you, you and all mainstream news media too. See if you can take to heart the words he spoke only 4 days before he was gunned down:
KING'S CHALLENGE:
"FIRST, WE ARE CHALLENGED TO DEVELOP A WORLD PERSPECTIVE. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood. . . . Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. . .
WE ARE CHALLENGED TO RID OUR NATION AND THE WORLD OF POVERTY. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I've seen it in Latin America; I've seen it in Africa; I've seen this poverty in Asia. . .How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God's children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India's population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.
AS I NOTICED THESE THINGS, SOMETHING WITHIN ME CRIED OUT, "CAN WE IN AMERICA STAND IDLY BY AND NOT BE CONCERNED?" And an answer came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. . .Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. . .this is America's opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will. In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a Poor People's Campaign. . . We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. . . yes, it will be a Poor People's Campaign. This is the question facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
AMERICA HAS NOT MET ITS OBLIGATIONS AND ITS RESPONSIBILITIES TO THE POOR. One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we've done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power. It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That's the question facing America today."
(The full text of Dr. King's sermon entitled "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" containing the above quotes can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/82npj. Dr. King delivered it at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968, and you can listen to two audio excerpts of the sermon at that same link.)
Today, forty years after Dr. King gave that speech, 41 percent of humanity still defecate in the streets because they have no access to sanitation, one-quarter are forced to live without electricity, and 30,000 kids DIE UNNECESSARILY EACH DAY (see my website listed below for the proof, along with an article about the statistical accuracy of such numbers generally here: http://tinyurl.com/yttp3s ). If you are indeed up for King's challenge, you'll need to seek out that world perspective he spoke about and get the real front page news on your own, because news which affects the largest number of people in the most serious ways is only rarely covered by television shows and newspapers!! My website, www.WhatNewsShouldBe.com , is one of the places you can find it. It's only when information concerning the most pressing issues facing humanity is widely known that the needless death and suffering can be stopped. Since mainstream news rarely speaks to this, it is Citizen Journalists that we must seek out for ourselves. There is enough for everyone: http://tinyurl.com/ytmfd3 . Please pass it on. Thank you and Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!
Angie
www.WhatNewsShouldBe.com
Can't get paragraph breaks to work unfortunately. So, after first paragraph from me above, see the middle of this page: www.WhatNewsShouldBe.org for Martin Luther King Jr.'s challenge - a challenge to all citizen journalists, necessary since the mainstream media has never taken it up.
As a local government reporter who was laid off at Steve Smith's newspaper a few months ago, I'd like to add another important point.
The most important thing that newspapers do - help keep government accountable to its citizens - is hard work.
Day-to-day newspaper journalism is time consuming and tedious. It involves printing uncomfortable truths about people who were nice to you. It requires knocking on strangers' doors and asking them about things they probably don't want to talk about. It occasionally confronts you with lawsuits and even physical threats from those you've written about.
It demands long hours, late meetings and paying unrelenting attention to detail, all under the scrutiny of editors and the public.
I've seen some great work on blogs. For many things they are an unparalleled avenue for revealing the truth and keeping people honest. But one of the failed notions of "citizen journalism" is that people will work for free. It assumes that somehow there is enough collective spare time out there for people with day jobs to adequately monitor the staggeringly complex institutions that make our society work.
Journalism is incredibly rewarding and can be a lot of fun. But it is remarkably rare for members of the public to take on the endless legwork that accountability requires with no compensation for their time or effort.
No one I know, for example, goes through hand-written campaign disclosure reports and enters the information into a spreadsheet to see where council members in the suburb I covered get their money.
No one I know talks to city and elected officials on a daily basis to question and challenge them on a wide range of arcane policy decisions that affect the public.
No one I know goes through the trouble and expense to obtain thousands of e-mails from city officials and then sift through them to find important decisions that weren't made in public.
No one I know takes hours out of their day to read the latest consultant's dry analysis of a complex public-private partnership that will cost the city millions.
Now the newspaper isn't doing any those things either.
Just because some corporations are carelessly taking advantage of citizen journalists doesn't mean citizen journalism is broken. You'll also find PR lackeys everywhere - including the local TV news.
I helped found a citizen journalism org called The UpTake (theuptake.org). We train CJs and provide an independent venue for their work, with a level of editorial control and traditional journalistic backbone of truth-telling.
I've been doing a news related podcast and my own investigations since 2004 without the backing of any institution. Trained as a journalist, and also used to man a cubicle at the Vvoice. I hold editors and owners responsible for the demise of quality journalism.. with their corporate values and business logic, their only priority is cutting costs.
We the citizen journalists or citizen reporters, we have our place on the internet and I think some us to important work that people might find if they look. Old school journalists at respected institutions, they should keep doing what they do best, but not be completely buried under corporate priorities and terrible MBA profit driven managing editors and owners.
Yesterday I was walking down the street and happened to see a man who happened to be wearing a nice suit stick his hand in an elderly ladies purse and lift a few hundred dollars. Instead of turning him into the police, being sure he didn’t get enough I offered him a couple of thousand of my own of my dollars. I felt since he was better educated than I he could use it to better the elderly lady and my lifestyles and help us get good health insurance plans.
Make any sense to any of you? Then why are we bailing out the same industry that gave us Enron the company that stole thousands of individuals’ retirements? The same industry that has destroyed the value of thousands of 401k, IRA and private retirement plans. All of this while building empires for themselves. Then having the gall to cry to the people who are supposed to be representing us about not having their golden parachutes.
Why do we as law abiding citizens accept thieves, liars, self centered jerks to continually order us to pay more so they can enjoy the fortunes we provided them? Remember that when we as a country had it good it was the workforce that did it. They did it by making products for the world and us. Not some creative finance guru that can charge fifty dollars for a late fee on a five-dollar balance on your credit card. That financed house for nothing down and only pay the interest on providing you not an investment rather high priced rent.
I think we should remember these people on election day and vote every incumbent out of office, then pass laws to take away their retirements, insurance plans, gains they made while in office and let the truly represent what we have to endure and think about every day.
Really enjoyed reading your
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Apr. 9, 2009 10:19 AM PDT.
Really enjoyed reading your article, adam! Well put.
