New Media v. Old Media

That's how I feel, too. Honestly, even the lines between what*is* new and old media are so blurry...The New York Times, for example, derives its main profits from the website now. It's not from the newspaper anymore. I'm guessing it's the same for CNN, or they wouldn't be plugging the website so hard, plus they set up www.ac360.com for Anderson Cooper a few years ago and they have a nightly live blog (well, nightly during the week--he doesn't do weekends anymore) and they encourage people to join in because every click they get is like a cash register going "ca-ching" because of the advertising bucks.

I'm still in love with the speed of information we get from the web...I mean, news stories are*legitimately* breaking on Twitter now. It's crazy.

But the concern about professionalism decreasing--and with it, media responsibility--is a valid one. I'm so fascinated to see what the future brings.

Here's a really good column you might be interested in from Mediaite, wherein the columnist explores how captured journalists overseas should remind us what the press is really for.

http://www.mediaite.com/mnudm

Hmm, why didn't that format? Let me try it this way:

www.mediaite.com/mnudm

Hmm sounds interesting...

Thanks, Laurie, I read the article and it was very interesting and made some very good points.

Annie

You're very sweet; thank you!

You bring up a really good point about the news spicing things up to keep people interested. That's what Walter Cronkite used to call "infotainment" and it's a big problem with all the networks but I think FOX and HLN are the worst offenders.

I didn't watch much news when I was a teen; I became a junkie in college (ha!). So I think you're right that teenagers aren't that interested...I did read the newspaper and read some news online, but I didn't become totally obsessed with news and media until I was 18 or 19...the tsunami got me hooked on Anderson Cooper's reporting, and then Hurricane Katrina brought not only his individual career, but modern media as a whole, to a completely different level.

I totally understand why if you spend 14 hours a day doing it for work! I do about ten hours at home, and as much as I love it, it seems like a lot...I also am on the computer constantly at my library job, so I'm pretty much glued.

Sorry this took so long--I typed a huge response earlier this afternoon, then my browser crashed and I had to leave for work.

I'll try to recap. I do think that anybody who quotes or links FreeRepublic as an unbiased resource is delusional. I have never seen so many fringe right-wing nuts in one place. That said, I would never make the claim that HuffPo is unbiased, but their fact-checking is good. Arianna does not mess around. She's a professional.

Drudge Report is a good way to see what the conservatives are pulling from the wire because it's news aggregation without original content, and most of the conservatives who are plugged in to web-based media are checking Drudge every day. Politico is one of those who claims to be unbiased and has a clear (right-wing) agenda that is no secret to anyone--particularly since they recently got themselves caught up in a scandal in which they were copying and pasting text from GOP press releases and passing it off as original reporting. Not good. Leftist as they are--and again, at least they admit it--HuffPo would never be caught dead lifting stuff from the DNC and reporting it as fact. If that happened on Arianna's watch, we'd hear the aftermath from our homes.

You make a strong point about people using the Internet to gain access to information...and not knowing how to use the Internet. If they're believing small-time blogs--or even big-time ones who are irresponsible, like Politico--that's a problem, and if they're getting information from unsourced tweets without verification, that's a problem. Citizen journalism is just that; there is more responsibility on the individual citizen when it comes to keeping the quality of the information out there up to snuff. I love that it's on the rise, but we do have to acknowledge the lack of professionalism that comes with it, and the fact that this does allow for misinformation to become more of a problem.