Believe it or not, but there was once a time newspapers were popular,
this was of course a while ago somewhere in the late 90's or as my wife
likes to refer to it as "in the year King Uzziah died"(yes i've used
that joke before...deal with it) . Although some social analysis will
tell you otherwise, the eventual death of the newspaper (and journalism
for that matter) has little to do with media houses being unable to keep
up with technology, although we must commend ZNS for always keeping
their technology no further than 26years behind industry standard. The
issue is perceived journalistic integrity and ethics or the lack there
of. Well dear Spectrum reader, (all one of you), this paper is as
ethical as it gets. We can not be bought by anyone, our virtue is not
for sale, notwithstanding that last term we may have leased it for a
bit, but no more. Just because we have an ad from Lugio Pizzaria and
Tennis Court, does not mean that we will not report the hard hitting
news, particularly when its a public concern and directly effects the
College community. This is why our January issue our lead story was
"Lugio Pizza Delivers on Deliciousness: Competition driven mad with
envy".
Proof enough i think, but a strong sense of ethics i fear may only
resolve half the problem, what about integrity? The other issue is the
fact that the newspaper industry is built on the premise of speculative
fiction, what is speculative fiction?
Well it is easiest if i give you an example. It is assumed that in
the next two weeks someone will be killed, they will probably die in a
non affluent neighborhood, etc, etc. so based on these common facts,
instead of writing a brand new story every time someone dies we have a
standard template that can simply be filled out with the relevant
information.
eg.
Circle where applicable
On (insert date) a (young, old) man was (shot, shot by police, found
in the bush) in the (Pinewood Gardens, Bain Town, Freeport) area
multiple times until he died. The man, (Kevin, Nardo, Something Ethnic)
was a (black, brown, mauve) complexion and (police suspect, onlookers
suggest) that the death is (drug, domestic, bunberrist) related . The
authorities are following several leads…
And that works.
You know it does, you've seen that exact story a thousand times. It
only become problematic when applied to other areas of the news. Take
for example a news story i wrote and reprinted every other month for the
past 4 years.
Bay Street closed today due to raging, rapist mermaids. The capital's
main through fair today fell victim to a suspicious group of mermaids.
Onlookers watched in horror as buildings on the water's edge were gutted
by merciless mermaids, destroying everything in their path. The police
force stood helpless as they tried to contain the mermaids and protect
the historic buildings of Old Nassau, but were impotent as no water was
available to restrain the merfolk.
Now for the 20 something times i've printed that, no one ever noticed
it sitting there on page 2 as a filler, but as a journalist i'm aware
of the concept of speculative fiction. its only a matter of time before
such an event happens, and when it does, the story is already ready, and
what do you know, Bay Street caught on fire and all i had to do was
switch out mermaids for fire and an automatic front page story, but
people don't like speculative fiction.
They hate it when you have two versions of the same paper written the
night before an election so that you can be the first one to drop the
scoop, they hate it when accuse the wrong person of rape on the front
page and then give a half a paragraph apology in a box under "1/2 off
all Benjamin Moore non latex paint", and they really hate it when you
report that a member of their family has died because you're a vulture
too consumed on moving units to ever check your facts or practice
investigative journalism. I'll admit that as student writer my research
often doesn't pass 3 wikipedia pages, but recently it seems that i'm
doing 3 times as much foot work as some folks.
A blog that oddly has very little to do with robots...
