The power of the internet is that everyone can be a journalist. The downside of the internet is that everyone can be a journalist.
The power of internet is that speed upon which people get news from any event. The downside is the speed. People get used to speed, and that creates cycle to create news fastly, which then can lead into incomplete, potentially erranous news.
The competition to get news out is the new goldrush. This means having news is the news. Speed over content. Correctness, truthfulness of them is seconday, and if there are any corrections, not many read those - corrections are not news anymore. If people spend time to send the corrections, the writer tends to add the correction in a form "n.n send this: blahblah" - aka not admitting the mistake on the first place but pointing out someone sending it (this is same as saying "sorry if i have offended anyone" - the word "if" points out not taking responsibilit) and bringing totally outsider into a limelight. Admitting mistakes would be crucial to gain trustworthiness.
Journalists....the fourth estate...the investigative journalism is not on its heights anymore. What is called investigative is nowadays just a longer text. Journalists are putting their opinions into the articles, instead of objective descriptions about the matters. This creates a twisted world view for the people who read those articles and believe them.
The decline of quality journalism has created a lot - and also contributed to decline - of alternate news, social media news - which are faster, and voluntary forces spending much more time for researching than journalists are allowed, thus creating much more accurate facts, stories than their commercial counterparts. There are signs of some commercial entities noticing this, and creating at least domain specific investigative news services emphasizing the quality of the reporting, publishing less often but better quality. Shouldn't the quality be the end result on all work and not quantity.
The behaviour of the journalists has changed, more towards tabloid like reporting Making embarrassing, revealing stories without thinking if the story hurt someone. That is not to say it should not be tough, but mocking, shaming is primary method is just wrong. Internet does have constitutional memory - what earlier was forgotten among the neighbourhood can nowadays found on the internet, tens of years afterwards. This means that people cannot have privacy, do things without fear of getting into internet.
Same news is a news - phenomenon is happening when during crisis, accidents etc people are rather taking social media experiences to share instead of letting rescue crews to do their jobs. In his way they can be part of news, doing something someone may read.
Partially, it could be debatable if the good journalism is dead due the preferences on reading habits - more readers are interested on lighter stories, and articles than actual investigative, pondering ones. This is part of the larger issue, also with papers leaning towards pleasing the majority and also just being first one to tell things. Sadly.
The ability to find news, albeit needing correlation and comprehension, to make a factual picture, has removed the need from me to follow news on the mainstream media. Even when it can take a bit more work to do so. This also makes finding patterns easier, and ability to anticipate events, making news as common information, whereas news should be something that people do not know. Nowadays so called news is what common man and woman do know.
