Anyone Could Be A Reporter, And Thats A Fact....

...I Think...?

In class this past week, we have talked a lot about newspapers and how they are being affected my new media. With the rise of the internet it is now faster to post news and read news stories. Instead of professional reporters being the ones to break the latest story, common citizens are the ones posting their own accounts, photos, and videos of breaking news stories. The thought got brought up in class: do we really need professional paid reporters? What if amateur reporters, non-paid volunteers citizens, were the ones who reported all of our news? We were asked at the end of the class period what we thought would be lost if we did this shift in news reporting.

The class ended before anyone really got to respond and I thought about it on my ride back home from campus.  I would have to say I think a lot would change. One of the biggest problems I could see happening would be the loss and blur of fact and opinion. I immediately flashed back to high school. I was part of the newspaper staff for three out of my four years. The first year you are considered a staff reporter. Before you can write anything for the paper you had to take a test. The test consisted of 15 sentences. You would have to read the sentence and say whether the sentence was a fact, or an opinion. It was eye opening to see the things I had mistaken for facts and others had mistaken for facts. One word in a sentence can blur that line. Every year you were on the paper you would have to do this test. I think it helped me a lot as a staff reporter to just be writing about facts and not let my own personal opinions creep in.

These things, and more, are the types of things that professional reporters and journalist are taught in school. If we had just anyone out there writing our cities, states, or country’s news than I think it would start consisting of people’s opinions being represented as facts. There is a reason that reporters are taught and trained to make their stories factual and unbiased and I think that it should stay that way.