Cookie -cutter Journalism VS Sensational Journalism or rather why I don’t want to be a Journalist

Countless times people asked me what my hobbies are and since one of them is writing , the immediate response oftentimes was; “Oh so you want to become a journalist?” My general reaction to that was simply trying to suppress my laughter and then figuring out how to convey that I am not interested in that line of work. Well, where do I start?

So how does journalism work? No not the publishing, the actual getting your message out into the streets/what do I put into my paper or more often nowadays site or blog (see what I did there? Okay I know I am not funny [I still try because I am an idiot])

There are two types of journalism (at least in my book) the everyday journalism (cookie-cutter journalism) and sensational journalism (or how I like to call it; click bait journalism, but not everything is on the internet now, is it?) The normal everyday journalism is the most common kind of journalism. It usually centres on local events and/or disasters as in; “Mayor Whothehellisthisguy attended opening of the new parking lot.” Or “Explosion of a local flour granary killed 5 imaginary people.” Or “Local football team scores 3.14 goals against mystery team.”

I think you get my point, normal everyday journalism isn’t necessarily the most exciting thing, but it is required to keep people up to date and usually well researched (at least to a certain extent… one would hope that is) That said there are a lot of people who are just going to ignore these news.

This is where sensational journalism comes into play. Sensational journalism tries to draw in readers with big headlines, colours, pictures, buzz words, popular figures, obscenity, punchlines etc. the results often look like this; “Male celebrity X cheats on female celebrity X for another woman who turns out to be a man who is a cousin to an African prince.” Or it fluffs up ordinary events with speculations or other theories; “Mayor Thisguy opens parking lot! Bribes involved?! We have totally legit sources connected to last years murder guys!!!”

Generally sensational journalism tends to be as researched as a copy pasted Wikipedia article for a school project. It mostly revolves around being first with the news and have it as big and loud as possible so that everyone is going to buy or at least view your stuff.

Simply put I can’t see myself doing journalism because of both of these types of journalism (Yes, I know my title is a bit klick baity, call me a hypocrite if you like) and I just ranted about why that is the case.