Why Journalists Focus on Negative Stuff
It’s their job to do so, that’s why. At least that’s how what Jeremy Wagstaff says it is. Compared to bloggers, who write about the world as they see it, journalists are trained to look for kinks. Journalists are trained to “research” for stories in places that the rest of us idiots won’t even dare to look.
Journalists are taught to identify “news”. In some situations, it’s obvious: A bomb goes off in Baghdad; two guys drive a flaming SUV into Glasgow Airport; Apple launches a cute phone. All news, and no one would disagree.But it’s the rest of the stuff that gets problematic. Most journalists don’t have these kinds of stories to work with so they’re forced to look for them, and that mostly involves prying apart things, people, organizations, situations, points of view and seeing some incremental change or difference that merits a news story, such as U.S. family terrorized by possible phone hoax (Cellphones Terror Weapon Horror!)
So Wikipedia, for example, gets coverage not for the millions of great articles in there and the millions of people who go to it first for information, but the few articles that are wrong, badly written, libelous, mischievous or biased. That, for a journalist, is the news story. (Wikipedia Unreliable Shock!)
Of course we here at JOAB try to do this too to some extent. So does that mean we’re journalists? Nah. That just means we’re a bunch of snarky (and sometimes offensive) people who are fond of picking things apart and criticizing/critiquing what we find.
Who’s offensive here?
Sometimes I miss the old label columnist in our little online blogging world.
Franky said this on July 8, 2007 9:43 pm