Blogosphere demonized by mainstream Media
"Most of what I read simply reinforced my view that blogs produced by professional journalists working under the brand banner of a "mainstream" news organization such as the Star must aspire to far higher standards than what’s emerging elsewhere in the blogosphere…A news organization’s credibility depends on its commitment to truth, accuracy and fairness. Though all media now face the rapid and radical evolution from print to digital, those ethical and professional principles are the gold standard of journalism."
And from the paper’s publisher John Cruickshank:
"What we’re discovering is that as we try to broaden our online audience beyond the subculture that writes and reads by its own set of rules, the new readers expect us to adhere to the same ethical and professional code as we do in print.
July 25th, 2009 at 2:07 AM
“A news organization’s credibility depends on its commitment to truth, accuracy and fairness”–Kathy English
A news organization’s first two priorities are to its advertisers and narrow-focus poltical, structural, stylistic slant. If “truth” gets in the way of those two priorities, it gets shuffled to the back of the bus. What hypocritical, arrogant twaddle. There’re many examples of bovine excrement on blogs of all sorts, but there are also many plusses lacking in the mainstream outlets: speed, depth, quantity, less pressure to conform due to less claustrophobic higher-ups, passionate engagement due to writing for pleasure instead of filling out a word-count in order to cash a cheque by deadlne, freedom to explore many non-mainstream subjects (i.e. pick an artistic genre) because of a lack of concern over quantity of readers ….
Of course, these snipes come from news outlets because they’re losing traffic to on-line options. Rather than reflecting and changing with the inevitable tide, they’re trying to compete with an outdated paradigm.