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So, you wanna be a journalist, huh?
I don't mean as a career. Who would want to do that? I mean, be a citizen journalist, the new buzz phrase that describes the people "formerly known as the audience," as journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it. Today, YouTube launched a project to teach people how to report, using video instruction from well-known journalists. Some of it is weird.
The project is called YouTube Reporter's Center. There, you'll find "How to Conduct a Good Interview" with Katie Couric. NPR's Scott Simon gives tips on how to tell a story. Bob Woodward has insight on investigative journalism. There are a couple dozen videos available so far.
Then, there's New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff explaining how to cover a global humanitarian crisis. "Never argue with people with large guns," is one piece of advice. And "there's no point in getting a great interview with a warlord, if afterwards, he kills you and takes your video recorder."
Thank you, Nicholas. I feel kind of dumb that I went to college to learn that.
I suppose having YouTube video-educated citizen journalists is better than having citizen journalists running around, booking interviews with warlords and then getting killed afterwards.
What do you think of this? Here are a couple of the videos I mentioned:
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First let me say that I really can't stand the movement that everybody can do everything, just by watching a video or taking an accelerated, hyped-up course (Full Sail offerings come to mind). I'm all for continuing education, and realize not everyone can afford formal schooling. But please don't watch a handful of videos and think of yourself as an expert.
All that being said, I think we as the audience have taken for granted that the people who wrote the articles in our printed newspaper are actually journalists. We just assume that, because we also assume that the newspaper company that is publishing the paper hires only qualified, educated staff members. So, by default, the story writers are qualified.
The potential problem with all online news is not that people will miss holding the paper, but that the lines between a blogger representing the audience, a citizen journalist, and a professional highly trained journalist are all now really really blurry. Going back to my point about taking newspaper journalists for granted, it becomes obvious now that we can't just assume a writer is "qualified" just because they have a website. Yet we <b>need</b> to know if they are, so that we can continually distinguish what is an onlooker's opinion and what is hard facts thoroughly researched and vetted.
When you add to the mix the increasingly easy ability to have a website design/theme that looks more like a professional corporate website and less like a teenage blog/diary, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish who is who writing the "news".
I'm not saying that the non-professionals should not have a place to speak their mind. I'm just saying, there should be disclosure and honesty, so we know the difference when we are reading the web.
Wow. I watched the first video and just started laughing. It's like a flippin' SNL skit.
I agree with the Oddball, the majority of "journalists" out there are not in fact trained journalists. I am not a journalist, yet the majority of my paid income over the years have been in the journalistic profession. I write poetry. I studied Plath and Faulkner and Wilde. Not "How to Interview a Drug Lord." Seriously?
There is of course, a long-standing movement that the only actual journalistic training is on-the-job training, and journalism degrees are in fact unnecessary. But this... when is it going to end? It seems anyone can put up their two cents about any topic, and the reader has to spend too much time trying to decide if the information is legitimate.
Because most people are too lazy to validate the source of their reading, or are unable to recognize crappy journalism versus the real deal, they just take it at face value. So the fact that YouTube is trying to perpetuate this behavior of citizen journalism is just... ugh!
I'm a former public radio reporter who left the field and now works in finance. In an ideal world, I'd keep my day job but lend my journalism skills in my free time -- maybe put together one solid feature length story a month pro bono.
The problem is newsrooms don't seem set up to accommodate somebody in my position. They're not used to it. In the future that will have to change. As more full time reporters jump ship or are pushed out, there will be too much unused talent for editors and news directors to pass up.
