Robert McChesney's "The Problem of Journalism" made me realize one of the reasons that I don't really follow the news very much. I don't like that news media has become a landscape without investigative journalism. I'm turned off by top stories about celebrities, and news about politicians' private lives is practically irrelevant to me when compared to actual topics in society that should be discussed. News is a business just like any other, and the bottom line is important to any private business, but the current news media seems to be only thinking short-term. Instead of developing an audience of people who want investigative journalism, the news is being trivialized to gain short-term wow-factor profits.
I also dislike that since news media has conglomerated we have are left with only a few large news companies who have profit share in multiple markets. By having such a broad scope of business, large media conglomerates have many advertisors throughout their various fields. Media companies make a lot of their money through advertising, so they are not going to have a journalist for their newspaper do an investigative piece on one of their advertisers only turn up something negative about them and lose their business in a different field.
Blogging is still small in comparison to large media companies, and it may be difficult right now to make money running a blog by yourself or in a small group. However, if big media continues to push people away by commercializing and trivializing the news, more people (especially young generations who will grow older and become more interested in what's going on in their world) will turn toward blogs and other online sources for their news. I don't have actual experience with it, but my guess is that bloggers don't have to look for advertisors for their sites; the site host either gets the advertisors for it, or the advertisors find which sites they want to advertise on. So, instead of the writer having to write around the advertisors, the advertisors advertise based on the writing and their expectation of who the audience is. Plus, online advertisements for a site seem to be more fluid and flexible--the ads change. This commercial freedom could open up the doors to investigative journalism where the bloggers are free from outside pressures not to step on toes because the ads will conform to the media instead of the media conforming to the advertisors.
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