Journalists or Bloggers?
Journalists often disregard the validity of the average blogger as a way to distinguished themselves from everyone else. Journalists do this to keep the benefits of being a journalist particular to journalists and to keep the general public away from the information that would allow them to write their blogs with as much accuracy and information as a reputable news source. While journalists see it as their jobs to report on news to help the general public that they are a part of, they feel as though they are not part of the group they report too, rather they feel as though they are above them.
The exclusion of journalist from the general public makes it easy for them to get different treatment when it comes to the way primary sources are dealt with. There are plenty of government press conferences that the general public cannot get in without government-recognized journalist IDs. While the price for these IDs is not astronomical, the average person will not go out to look for them as they also require constant contribution in the form of editorials or participation in their papers. While groups like the United States Press Association (USPA) often encourage both professional journalists and bloggers to join their association, journalists still do not want to be compared to journalists. This leads to journalists fighting with each other over what journalism should be doing.
Some bloggers are keen on supporting journalism to survive in the digital age. Michael Geist talks about how new companies are slowly coming up and making the most of the digital age. As Geist puts it, “the emergence of new voices and the innovative approaches at older ones point to the likelihood that journalism is neither dead nor dying.” While there are different laws in Canada than there are in America, the way groups work together to make changes for the betterment of journalism is the same as it would be in this country. Some of the companies and freelance journalists in the Canadian Gallery cover a wide range of stories that allow them to collectively reach a much greater audience than they could alone.
Personally, I believe that journalism is slowly breaking down as it struggle to both out itself on the internet and take itself off of the internet. The collaborative effort of some of these companies does challenge me to consider that some big change is evident in the future of journalism. With optimists like Geist it seems almost as if journalism will in fact get itself together and help the general public by letting them become a part of the process. Historically speaking the way journalism has adapted to new mediums of communication was always relatively smooth and allowed for greater coverage and reader/viewership. The internet was the first real hiccup in journalism’s history. Many fractures occurred as well as the exclusion of the general public in the process of what the news is. With recent groups that have formed, like the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery, there seems to be a shift towards the restructuring of journalism.
