Journalism and Social Media

Because I am a journalism student, I have talked, researched and discussed with many of my fellow students and faculty members about the topics above. I am choosing to talk about this because I think it is important and they are pertinent issues in the journalism field. I am also very interested in this topic, so I thought it would be fun to take the opportunity you gave us to design our own multi-part question and write about something in journalism that is appealing to me.

I recently read an article somewhere, in which BBC journalist Sigrun Rottman said that objectivity in journalism is an illusion and the media should think more of being balanced than being objective. According to her, objectivity in the media does not really exist. This hit home for me because before being a journalism student I believed that objectivity in journalism was undoubtedly the focal point of the profession and that the business of every journalist was to be objective. The truth and the reality of this belief as we know it and as I have come to understand is that objectivity in journalism really doesn’t exist or to put it in better terms, it doesn’t exist to the extent that we perceive it should. So, the oft-stated and exceedingly desired goal of modern journalism is objectivity - the ‘disconnected’ gathering and dissemination of news and information; this allows people to arrive at decisions about the world and events occurring in it without the journalist’s subjective views influencing the acceptance and/or rejection of the information. It’s a pity that such a goal is impossible to achieve! As long as humans gather and disseminate news and information, objectivity is an unrealizable dream.

Okay, so what does journalism require? How are journal...

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...hat will help you build your journalistic toolkit. I have talked a lot about social media in several of journalism classes and have learned a lot about it, so I thought it would be fun to inject my thoughts behind it in relation to how journalists’ can and should use it for their benefit.

Works Cited

1. "Journalism Ethics Online Journalism Ethics Gatekeeping." Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen. Web. 05 Dec. 2010. .

2. "Journalists and Social Media | The Changing Newsroom." The Changing Newsroom | New Media. Enduring Values. Web. 05 Dec. 2010. .

3. Corbett, Julia B. Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages. Washington, DC: Island, 2006. Print.