Quick Journalism

Nick Niehaus
nn775014@ohio.edu

https://memacinn.wordpress.com

There's a new type of journalism, it's evident in any platform that you may read.  It didn't stem from just journalism alone, the world around journalism is what formed the "new type of journalism".

This new type of journalism, spreading as much information as you can as fast as you can.  There's pros and there's cons for what journalism does for the public today.

Pros

1. Reader has more content to go through than ever before
2. Information from one topic can be found through various platforms such as video or print.
3. Easier ways for news outlets to track how much viewership each story receives

Cons

1. Credibility
2. Credibility
3. Credibility

Ever since journalists made the switch to online media through Twitter or Snapchat or any other social media site, credibility for  certain journalists has inevitably dipped.  The numbers on what percentage the public trusts media has never been high, but it is at an all time low in the past few years.

It all stems from what I will call "quick journalism", the type of journalism where you find your story, write it up as quickly as you can and send it out for the world to see online.  It sounds great, giving an audience the quickest news they can find, but it comes with literal flaws in copy.  Journalists have been getting away with these flaws through quick journalism by having the ability to correct themselves after publishing errors.

Getting away with that is no longer acceptable, more and more people have called out journalists for errors within their print no matter the size of the mistake.  One advantage for the reader is the ability to reply directly to the publisher through Twitter, making journalists easier to criticize than ever before.

Even with all the criticism journalists receive now, the problem of credibility is very much alive.

This isn't me getting on a soapbox saying all journalists have done recently is kill the definition of journalism that we have known for so long. There are many great new aspects to news this quick type of journalism lets us find.  

There is one thing responsible for this quick journalism too, Twitter.

Almost every person I talk to ends up saying their main source of news is through Twitter. A site that has been valued at $13 billion dollars at one point.

Twitter has many great features that gives readers better information.

• Verifying accounts to let the reader pick a more credible source
• Hyperlink keywords through hashtags giving the reader more options 
• Allowing videos and links to other websites letting the reader find different platforms of information

So yes, not all change in journalism has been bad but there does need to be a mission from all journalists to make sure there is no downward trend.

Publish truthful, fact-checked information without flaws through any of the new forms of social media.  The criticism and doubtfulness readers have to journalists will diminish as credibility will rise. Everybody with the ability to publish to a large audience needs to do their part to fix the opinion the public has on journalists recently.