Allison Elkin was the Spring 2015 co-chief copy editor of the RRJ. Journalism 101
Roy MacGregor of The Globe and Mail published an excellent article in today’s paper. “It is time to rethink Journalism 101,” the article begins. “When newspapers start confusing ‘hits’ with ‘circulation,’ there is an undeniable danger to journalism.”
Journalism today, saturated with tweets and blogs and hastily construed online stories, is no longer governed by the content that it’s perpetuating but by the reaction it yields from its audience. In other words, journalistic success is becoming measured by the amount of eyes it draws rather than the nature and quality of the information itself.
This, to me at least, is troubling. In our celebrity obsessed, material driven society, which is largely ignorant and uninterested in anything that doesn’t involve sex or beauty or the Kardashian sisters, it’s scary to think that media organizations will allow their consumers to define the news they produce. This hasn’t happened yet, but MacGregor’s is a warning we should all be paying attention to.
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