Do we still need old-fashioned journalists?
The Los Angeles Times had a recent piece in which they argued that we still need old-fashioned journalists — journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, a human rights reporter in Moscow who was critical of the Russian government and was apparently assassinated.
The story goes on to mention other journalists who have paid for their calling with their lives, including “the two German journalists killed in Afghanistan the same day [or] their 75 colleagues who have died so far this year in 21 countries, and the 58 who died last year. And while “citizen journalism” or “networked journalism” (as Jeff Jarvis calls it) is good, the La Times piece says: it is “not a substitute for Politkovskaya and her colleagues.”
Is the LA Times piece right? Obviously it is. Bloggers are not going to replace the kind of reporting that Politkovskaya and others do around the world — no one with any sense would make that claim. But blogging and other forms of networked journalism can sure as heck augment that kind of reporting, as I wrote on my other blog here. And that is definitely worthwhile.
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