Midterm Blog Post

After I watched the “Shattered Glass”, read “Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local” by Jock Lauterer and studied different articles on the public’s trust in the media, I’ve realized how important it is to be a credible journalist in my community, when I graduate.

Being in tune with your community is very important in the journalistic field. The relationships you build with different people can either make or break your career. If people in the community do not trust you that could make my job a lot harder. However, if I can build good relationships with people in my community you can help me in a variety of ways.

When interviewing someone in a community try to establish a conversation instead of just asking them questions and following up with the interviewee after an interview will make them feel like you care about them. Also, being open about yourself and asking them questions about themselves not related to your story can also help. According to an article on the Poynter website it states, “We’ve also found it valuable to discuss questions about the onions internally on a regular basis”.

These suggestions will help when you are crowdsourcing for a story or when someone in the community has a story you do not know about. Although crowdsourcing is an effective way to gain information about your community it is important to make sure that information is credible.

Organizations and businesses will usually not say anything bad about themselves, so make sure to not only interview people who work there but also people who go there. Also, doing some background work on your source to make sure they are not biased is also important. Because if I were to publish something that was false or exaggerated, it is not the source who will be in trouble it will be me.

In the movie “Shattered Glass” centered around Stephen Glass, Glass is a journalist who works for the new republic. However, during his time there he fabricated most of his articles for the magazine. This eventually resulted in Glass being fired from the publication.

From this I learned that even though you might have a lot of responsibilities in high expectations from other people, it is important to stay credible. If a reporter is caught being unethical or not credible it could not only result in, you getting fired from your publication but prevent you from being hired in other places of work. For example, after being fired, Glass went on to get his law degree from Georgetown University however he was never able to get hired from a farm because of his unethical behavior.

This has happened to many journalists in the field like, Jayson Blair from the New York Times and Jack Kelly of USA Today.

Journalists who fabricate information, plagiarize, and are ethical are some of the reasons why people do not trust the media. In a survey taken by the Pew Research Center it states, “No more than half of US adults feel confident in the news media”. We are now all live in a society where we hear the term “fake news”.

Dictionary.com definition for fake news is false news stories that are often sensationalized and created to be widely spread or distributed for the purpose of generating revenue or political movement. From this definition I really focused on the generating revenue or political movement aspect. With the upcoming election I feel that a lot of news stations have been using fake news to promote revenue and promote their political biases.

In an article called “American see skepticism of news media is healthy, as a public trust and institution can improve” written by Jeffery Gottfried, Mason Walker, and Amy Mitchell it’s states, “ 72% of US adult say news organizations do an insufficient job telling their audience where their money comes from”.

I think the best way to repair the relationship between the public and the media is to be completely transparent with the audience. Also, being aware of our own biases is vital to bell building a relationship with our audience. Our responsibility as journalists is to report news to our audience in a “black and white” style and allow the audience to think for themselves.