Is Self-Convergence an Excuse?

Gabriella DeLuca

GD297006@ohio.edu

Every profession is difficult. Now perhaps I am being biased (which is one of the ultimate no-no's of Journalism and one of the the topics our Ethics class has been discussing), but I think being a journalist is one of the tougher jobs out there. Sure, we don't have to go through the extra years of schooling like doctors, lawyers, etc., and maybe we only have to take a couple of math/science classes (how's that for stereotyping?), but once we make it out into the real world, things can become pretty hairy.

In one of the articles that we were assigned to read for class, the story of Mitch Albom was presented. According to the article, Albom wrote incorrect statements in a sports column regarding the 2005 NCAA basketball tournament. Instead of writing what actually happened as if he were there, he wrote about what he assumed would happen prior to the actual game.

As a journalist, I cannot imagine making this huge error. Was Albom truly planning on lying to the world? How could he do that? With serious mistakes like these, it is easy to understand why people sometimes think that journalists have low ethical standards. Anyway, it seemed like Albom's entire career was at stake. Was he no longer considered a reliable journalist? It is not as if anyone was seriously harmed by his statements, but it was incredibly wrong. If it were a younger, less experienced journalist, his/her entire career could have been ruined. Because of Albom's notability, his ego was more scathed than his career.

David Bulla, the author of the article about Albom said that part of the problem has to do with self-convergence. From what I understood from Bulla's definition is that self-convergence is when a individual journalist provides stories for all different sorts of mediums, such as print, television, Internet, etc.

So if this is the definition, is a journalist considers themselves to be "self-convergent" also considered a multimedia journalist? It seems that in almost every journalism job out there, whether it be reporting, producing, advertising, or whatever it may be, there needs to be self-convergence. Journalists are currently trying to find the best way to get their stories out there to the public, so I think that a little self-convergence is necessary. Multimedia journalists are the new-age journalists, and I think it is going to remain that way for quite a while.

As for Albom, I think blaming his error on self-convergence is a cop-out. If he was being strained too thin, then he should not have written the article. Sure, the world may have forgiven him for his error, but I would bet that a lot of his readers think twice before completely believing his stories.