Imagination Within Journalism
Does our imagination run wild when it comes to writing articles or stories? Are we so hell bent on catering to the public what we think they want, to create the rise and reaction that we are most hoping for? Even in the world of non-fiction writing I can’t help but wonder how much a little bit of ourselves and our curiosity makes its way into our pieces. Journalism and news writing for example has one major purpose, to inform the people of a specific event or occurrence, and to create a reaction from it can either be viewed as part of this purpose or more as a side affect. I guess the question we have to ask ourselves, is if it’s ok to bend the truth, pose or create questions and alter scenarios, to make people think about an ulterior motive? I suppose once you have given someone the cold hard facts your opinions or comments are unimportant, they will do with the information what they will. Wrong. If you take a piece of writing and you say, “This plane exploded over the Atlantic and 200 people died,” this is merely a fact, people can come up with whatever conclusions they want. However, if you state the previous sentence and then add, “I believe that this explosion could have been an act of terrorism,” this is now adding on your own sense of wonder, imagination if you will, and in turn is shaping the conclusions and thought processes of others. Maybe someone else would have assumed that there was a malfunction, someone else could have imagined it was the weather, another person could have created up a scenario of an intense movie-like action scene where secret agents and criminals are fighting on the plane. There are endless possibilities to the creations that people can come up with based off of a story or an event. It is the responsibility of those in the world of news to depict it as accurately as possible, but is it wrong to add a little more to engage a spark from the people?
In my MCS 499 class we focussed on a reading by Dominic Boyer, The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era, that sparked this curiosity within me of how news writing is approached and taken. Chapter 1 discusses slotting and the importance of the position within the news world. It is through this that the news holds great importance of maintaining quick and factual information to the public. However, as I continued to read into Chapter 2, I began to question if, and how much, the modernizing times have changed this outlook of precise factual information and have turned more towards how quickly it can be given out and how much reaction it gains. The faster you can get information out, the more successful you are, with companies flooding in constant amounts of information daily. In a specific section of Chapter 2, Boyer specifically states, “I discuss how the fast-time temporality and informatic feedback procedures characteristic of online news are affecting (and some would say afflicting) traditional practices of news journalism” (49). Going back to my original thoughts, is this new-age change one of positivity? Allowing people to use more of their own thoughts and opinions when it comes to news stories, getting the facts here and now with some blank spots for questioning, or is it harming how we look at the world, with too blank a slate and not enough facts to fill in the blanks or have a precise understanding of the true story? I think this can be said for the more internet-based forms of news media, where almost anyone can instantly hop online and blog or post their thoughts with just the click of a button. Boyer points this out in a sentence where he states, “The massive potential to circulate and republish news content in the digital era is indeed unsettling to the point of being unthinkable for a great many news professionals-” (51). How factual is the information at that point? How much of the story is left up to our imagination?
