I realized that I’m not that up today with my news. I don’t watch the evening news and I don’t typically read any papers during the week. Maybe I’m just behind the times. The news I do read / watch is technical news and world news. I get this from Flipboard . I also subscribe to the local paper, the Sunday edition. We do read the paper in our house, though the global stories I may already know about, the local ones are great. The best part of the local paper for me is the local stories, business, and editorials. I don’t read it for global news, because I can get that somewhere else. I love information regarding our local area. In our home, we also subscribe to a few magazines; Outside, Inc, Mens Journal, and Fast company. It is interesting to see similar articles in each magazine about the same topic with a different spin. However, both cover the same facts.
How trustworthy is online news? I tend to take some of it with a grain of salt. Rumors, gossip, and ideas tent to be abundant on the web. Take for example my blog. I tend to only write about things I care about, and skip the rest. I personally would not find my site a great place for news, but rather a place for conversation.
This article from Read Write Web shows how tools of journalism may have fallen to the wayside in this new age.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-a-bogus-apple-rumor-hoodwinked-online-news-outlets.php
I am not sure how many online journals are similar to my blog where I read information and do a quick search and call that fact checking. Because I am not an authoritative source, or have many followers I don’t really care that my “opinion” is correct or incorrect. However, a news article or story I would like to think to be truthful.
Overall, It must be hard to be a journalist in this era. Anyone with a blog can be a writer or an information source. The skills to be a good journalist may be eroding, but I can tell when I read a good article. I see great things like grammer (I don’t have that), fact checking, sources, similar backgrounds, and a great story.
I agree that being a writer or journalist is a difficult profession in this micro blogging age. However a trained writer and journalist has a place. Magazines, newspapers and other news mediums may change but a good investigative article or story will still be created. The delivery mechanism may change over time.