The internet is a haven for anyone and his dog to write down their inner most thoughts. Blogs have become a dime a dozen, with every teenage girl writing about her One Direction obsession and most middle-aged house-wives filling their afternoon hours blogging about cake making. Suddenly everyone has become a journalist and thus journalism has taken the same path as the word, ‘literally’, it has become meaningless.
However, the teenage ‘Directioner’ isn’t planning on making
a living from her ramblings, her blog is the 21st century equivalent
of the diary that we hid under our pillow, if you don’t Google One Direction,
which I personally don’t plan to do, then you’ll be blissfully unaware of her
waffling. The difference is that people like Arianna Huffington do make their
living from free content. Unfortunately, her rising bank balance is fairly
unequal to those who write for her. The Huffington Post, essentially a
glorified blog in itself, is the torch-bearer at our much-loved journalism’s
funeral. The 3000 contributors to the site are unpaid, unreliable and
unmonitored. Fact-checking seems to have become irrelevant and proof-reading
has become a thing of the past. I’m not a stranger to Huff Post myself, but the
US site reaches 85million unique users per month and it is quickly becoming
one of the most visited websites on the internet.
To step away from nattering on about the depreciation of
journalistic integrity, (I can spend a while criticising The Daily Mail for
their typos and false information), free content is a disaster for the
published press as well. It is over-written that newspapers are on the decline
with The Guardian estimating that they’re in their last decade and cut backs
across magazines. Newspapers can no longer afford to support their writers, why is it that we no longer feel journalists (or writers at least) deserve to make a living from their skill? And what does it mean for print journalism?
The fundamental destruction of journalism is not the fact
that we now read from a lit-up electronic device rather than paper, but that
the young generation who write for the lit-up devices use it as an excuse to
boycott established and important journalistic practice. It is all too easy to
publish a made-up statistic or a false statement therefore filling the minds of
others with gibberish and grot. By all means create your corner of the internet
to write about that banana and apple muffin you made last week, but do it for
you. For the public, bring back the editors and slow the process down, or our
children won’t know the difference between their, ‘there’ and their, ‘they’re’.
