By VALERIA VIERA
Theodore Dawes explains in his article “The Fall of Journalism” that people tend to think that the newspaper is the product and that people are the customers. He says it is the other way around, stating that “advertisers are the customer and reader attention is the product.”
He explains that for years he has asked the same question: “Why are newspapers published?” and says he has received no good answer. To him, the real answer is because it makes money for the publisher.
Dawes believes that it is all driven by advertising and is about money, not really about the structure of it and those well-written articles, pointing out that he has “never taken a course in journalism, which I regard as a boon to my career and particularly to my reporting.”
This is an interesting point of view by a journalist himself, also expressing the relationship between newspaper owners and reporters; this first one taking advantage of reporters.
“Newspaper owners have for centuries utilized this leaning to pay reporters peanuts. In fact, reporters are the lowest paid among occupations that require a college degree. In most places they earn 40-50 percent less than the local librarian. The newspaper owners benefit greatly from the naiveté of those in their newsroom. They’re not going to say a word.”
This caught my attention because it should not be like that since reporters are primarily the ones who find something newsworthy for people and who are making an impact in the audience.
Dawes has another interesting point of view regarding journalism: he does not believe there exists such thing as “journalistic objectivity,” which is “a significant principle of journalistic professionalism that can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities.” He states that people believe they are reading the objective news, when in fact they are not: “Objective news was and remains a joke, but Americans continue to believe it exists.”
There are many points of view in society about what journalism is or should be, and many people out there who have different opinions and ways to look at the profession as a whole. But we journalists have to keep in mind that no matter what it is said, we always stick to the basics of professional journalism: write the truth and only the truth. Be honest to your audience and always give them something newsworthy for them to read about.
You can read more at: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_fall_of_journalism.html#ixzz2kv7Asr6y