Newspaper Writers Won’t Be Happy With This

The San Francisco Chronicle has a new feature on its website where podcasts of calls from readers are posted.  The title of the feature is called “Correct Me If I’m Wrong.” 

 I’m pretty sure the last thing newspaper journalists want to hear is a dozen phone calls a day from readers who will claim “That’s not how it happened” or “you’re being bias” etc.

This shows a blatant change in the journalism world, where communication between writers and readers is becoming more prominent and even a necessary part of good journalism.  Readers can now react to any story they read beyond just leaving a comment on a message board following an article.  There is now an entire page on the web where their actual voices will be posted with their thoughts and feelings to the rest of the websites readers.  This means that basically anyone with an opinion can be a broadcasted journalist.

This trend is quite threatening for people such as myself who wish to become writers.  As great as involving the reader in the stories is, you don’t want it to get to the point where the readers are reporting the stories and making the corrections themselves.  Isn’t that the editors job in the first place?  Citizen journalsim is now more existent than ever thanks to the web, and now with newspapers giving in there’s no telling how far it will go in ten years down the road.

 Better start studying finance for the future, just in case.

Here is the link to the story

1st Post

Hi my name is Brandon Shapiro.  This is my first post.   I am the greateststudent at Quinnipiac University