What's missing from raw footage streamed to the Web is an authoritative voice, the result of years of source cultivation, the building up of levels of trust that allow a reporter to put something in context. It's something that only established news outlets ... can do: flood the zone with reporters on a major story and report not just that there was a massacre of Congolese Tutsi in Burundi or a student riot in Paris, but also knowledgeably examine the economic and political reasons behind it. Most people need an expert to filter, prioritise, and context information. A fire hose of information without that is useless.
Yet now anyone can call himself a journalist.
"Hey, I can do that."
No, you can't.
My thoughts exactly.
- Also read: Stewart Pinkerton in The Fall of the House of Forbes on "A venerated editor, a rookie reporter, and the sparks that flew between them, leading to a brilliant expose of Avon".
But isn't that argument coming from the opinion that journalists themselves don't do enough research and have their own pressures and biases to their reporting? We have started calling it the 2-minute noodle reporting. So people might not agree that the opinion on the TV screen is coming from an 'expert' who is 'well-experienced' and has done ample 'research'
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