My Plan To Save Journalism
By Telvin Poledore
In the next decade, a lot in of things in journalism need to be changed in order for it to thrive in the future.
I believe that one thing that should change is the authenticity of the news we get from the newsrooms. I am touching on this to say that we need more diversity in the newsrooms. We talked about this a lot in class but I feel like if the newsrooms are more diverse, then the actual news will be more authentic.
For example, The Chicago Tribune has a majority of whites in the newsroom while Chicago has mostly Blacks populating it. Therefore, the people reading the news won’t hear it delivered by someone they can relate with. This should change because instead of making Journalism so commercial, it should be more authentic with identifying the audience and trying to serve them better.
In addition to moving Journalism in a direction where it is less commercial. The funding for it can not only rely on the advertisers. This is because they can sometimes take advantage of it and make it all about promoting things and not really about pushing out authentic stories the people we serve really want to hear. This goes back to the idea about incorporating more entrepreneurial skills into journalism. Instead of just taking money from advertisers, try to sell it to the actual readers. For example, when we learned about, The Correspondent in class. A news outlet that is funded by member support. I think that if it is done this way, journalism can be more personal with the actual readers supporting it by funding.
This is how I think journalism should be in the future, more personal. Because at the end of the day, we could try to “eradicate fake news” as much as we can but, if we make it more authentic to the people who are taking their time to read by having more diversity and gaining support from them, it can outweigh all of the “fake news” and also we can rethink the whole idea of technology eventually taking over this business as well.
My overall plan that I believe in is to make Journalism more personal to the writers and readers and if we have this kind of mindset towards it, we can really make a difference.
