IJEA Blog: What is RIGHT in journalism? Actually, quite a lot.
Whenever people despair over the sensational and unethical aspects of journalism, Amanda Bright likes to point out what's working in our craft. And that's exactly what she does in the first video contribution to our blog!
October 17, 2016
For the IJEA Blog this week, I am sharing my thoughts about the state of American journalism through video, perhaps as a case in point for all of the creative techniques being used in media today.
Whenever people despair over the sensational and unethical nature of our craft, I like to point them back to what IS working, which we can find in legacy news organizations, emerging media strategies, and of course, scholastic and college-level media.
For more on a few of the ideas mentioned in the video, check out these links, starting with journalists who were interviewed by Neiman Lab and asked what will happen to journalism in 2016. (Let’s see who got it right!)
Also included is NPR’s live annotated fact checking of the first 2016 presidential debate, which was built on their beat system for reporters and was novel for that organization in September of this year. The New York Times was also in fact-checking mode with a handful of live journalists commenting from their opinion and political desks, as well as an army of people dedicated to looking things up AS the candidates asserted them.
A newer trend in convergence is Transmedia Journalism, which is beyond multi-platform to collaboration across institutions. Examples of this can be found in work like The Panama Papers and The Marshall Project. Or, you can take a trip down memory lane with a late-90s version of convergence with the New York Times’ “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace.”
Finally, the idea for this blog was sparked from The Brookings Insitutions’s take on political media coverage in 2016, which I found, through research, expanded beyond the political coverage to the rest of the craft.
And, as this blog suggests, it’s never bad to remind ourselves of the foundational principles of good journalism through the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics (in case you’ve never read it …).
Thanks for watching!
Amanda Bright taught journalism and advised the yearbook and student newspaper at Mattoon High School from 2008 to 2016. Currently she teaches journalism at Eastern Illinois University and is finishing her doctoral studies in Curriculum, Instruction, and Media Technology at Indiana State University.