Journalism still matters

Journalism changed the past years. The come up of the digital world had a big influence on the new back then. All the information you needed was in the new papers every day. You knew that the news paper was a reliable source for your information and that was enough for you. Now are things different, because the digital environment makes it hard to distinguish the reliable and unreliable sources. Everyone is posting information and you don't know where to start. The digital world definitely changed the way that readers get their information, but more importantly, the digital world change the way of working as a journalist.

The way of working changed, but a journalist is still important. A journalist can gather information more easily than before. A journalist can communication with others more easily than before and the most important one, the job of a journalist nowadays is breaking stories. The journalist's job is different, but that doesn't mean less important. They still matter.

The power of the internet is something a journalist can take advantage of. They can ask the readers what they think about a certain subject, so it can help the journalist to maybe get some new ideas or to understand the subject matter in a different way. Another interesting way of using the readers as an information source is by interacting with them on a blog for example. To talk with each other instead of just telling stories to them. That can help the journalist to help the readers better understand the subject matter. To be strong at those things at a journalist, you have to be transparant to the readers, so they know the value of your stories and they are willing to talk seriously about them.

"Now and for the foreseeable future we need a cadre of full-time workers who report the things that someone somewhere doesn't want reported, and who do it in a way that doesn't just make information available, but frames that information so that it reaches and affects the public." - Anderson, Bell and Shirky

Everyone can post anything online and most of the times it is copied from someone else. For a normal reader it can be really hard to see what is real and what is not. Therefore, this is an important job for a journalist to fulfill. A journalist can do research about the topic and reach out to the people that would know more about the subject matter. The power of a journalist is that it has the skills to go and ask for the uncomfortable but meaningful questions and finding the right data to give the story strength. They can go to the bottom of the story and see whether it is true or not.

Journalism still matters, because they are the only ones with the skills to find the interesting truth behind stories that can make the news. They know how to gather those kind of information, for example with communicating with the readers on a blog, with finding the right datasets or with the people they know more about the subject. Everyone can write a story, but only journalists can find the truthful interesting ones.