Comm455/History of Journalism

Image from http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2013/6/28/9/enhanced-buzz-20587-1372427004-11.jpg.

“The growing professionalism of the press and newspapermen in news coverage and the quality of writing (featuring talented writers). Writers were professionals and worked and live by their pens fulltime.”

Journalists living by their pens is certainly an image that has faded with time. Now, it is more like journalists live by their smartphones, waiting for the next Tweet that they can use as a breaking story to report.

Watching “All the President’s Men” reminds viewers that once upon a time, journalists had to call around or even visit people for answers, not text them, to find clues to break stories. They spent hours typing their stories on type writers and correcting typos. They didn’t have auto-correct to to fix misspellings.

In fact, now bloggers are considered journalists. It is an ongoing debate if bloggers can really be journalists, but in my opinion, anyone who puts pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to write up a story is a journalist. We are all journalists. Bloggers are the new era of journalists.

Do we even need to go to school to be journalists? Can’t we just post articles to Buzzfeed and be considered journalists? The era of the Buzzfeed journalist is definitely on the rise. And that is okay, because journalism is always changing. The news is different every day. We need to find new ways to report the news.

It is okay that journalism is progressing forward. That is how new trends are set in motion and new traditions come about. Nowadays, journalists don’t live by their pens fulltime, they live by their smart phones. In twenty years from now, who knows what they will live by next?