The Evolving Field of Journalism Through the Eyes of an Inexperienced College Student

The foundations of my future career is changing, and as I imagine what 1950’s journalists felt like with the emergence of television, I am both excited and afraid.

As I touched upon briefly in my previous blog post “How Social Media is Re-Defining the News Media Industry” We no longer live in a time where there are only three channels on the TV, or a time in which we can all rely on Walter Cronkite to give us the evening news. We have access to a wider range of news media than ever before in history, and while this is good in terms of message pluralism, it is also failing in successful compromise and standard journalistic morals.

In a polarized nation journalists are being forced to pick a side to appeal to a demanding, and splintering audience. A choice that must be made: to follow the standard morals of journalism, or succumb to the pressures of bias and opinion laced articles.

But a changing industry is needed, and while it may seem like I disfavor “bias reporting” I actually see it as a tolerable result of the internet’s effects of how we gather and personalize the information we read. I wouldn’t want to impose what I believe another journalist should be, but rather we should support where our ideals take us, in the name of spreading awareness or exposing corruption.

I also see this change to the news media industry as a necessity to answer to the positive aspects that new media has had on information gathering and dissemination. As I outline in my first two blog posts referencing the Arab Spring and Iranian election respectively, the internet has been a tremendous support in connecting and assembling groups of people dissatisfied with their government and seeking change.

We are in the precipice of journalistic change and to come out of it stronger than ever we must adopt the internet fully in the daily work routine by incorporating social media users as more reliable sources of information (as detailed in my third blog post), but we must also not change the overall foundation of journalism. We must resist the urge to become overtly opinionated and resist the pressures of one single group of people and their personal agenda in order to report news that is non-bias and factual for any to read and discern from it their own ideology.