It seems like the whole world is reading the blog. Ten minutes after I posted my recent denunciation of bad journalism, I got an invitation to speak to future journalists and discuss why I’m so unhappy with the state of contemporary reporting.
I’m not sure if I will have time to mention the Rolling Stone debacle but it’s a great example that not only the foreign affairs reporting sucks.
This will be fun.
Clarissa's Blog 
This should be fun.
For me, the critical issue in journalism is the trade-off between quality and speed. Apparently, it’s better to be first to publish a story than to be accurate, thorough, or have correct language usage. I haven’t kept tabs on the number of times CNN has had to retract or significantly revise reports they’ve issued, but it’s to the point that I’ve stopped reading their releases.
Editing and fact-checking are crucial skills, not busy work. When accuracy and quality become subordinate to sales, the purpose of the organization changes from information to entertainment. The value of a good reporter is diminished.
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I’m going to concentrate on foreign affairs reporting, and the issue here is that journalists who write about foreign affairs have to be immersed in the language and the culture of the country or region they are reporting on. I have no idea how anybody can report on Ukraine, for instance, if one is not fluent in Ukrainian and Russian and can’t access the sources in these languages. The problem is, however, that Slavic Studies have been gutted everywhere, so future journalists don’t have a way of gaining any sort of fluency or learn about the region.
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You might want a look at these
http://halfsigma.typepad.com/half_sigma/2012/08/to-succeed-in-journalism-have-rich-parents.html
http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/longreads/how-succeed-journalism-when-you-cant-afford-internship
Half sigma in particular used to track the backgrounds of young NYT reporters and found they all had rich parents and none of them majored in journalism.
This is also clear in the Rolling Stone care where the ‘reporter’ failed miserably in the most basic types of fact checking.
This points toward journalism becoming essentially charity work (or journalists are more and more remittance men) that the less skilled children of the elite are funnelled into rather than let them into the family business where they could do real harm to the family’s interests…
I actually began studies as a journalism major and quit for something less practical (I loved working in newspapers but hated studying journalism for a vareity of reasons). Still, I have some respect for journalism as a profession which most journalists now….. don’t.
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