After reading this article and looking at the web site’s mentioned I have some mixed feelings about the future of investigative journalism and online journalism. I think that investigative journalism is going back to what is was supposed to be. Now, as described in the article, news organizations and reporters don’t actually investigate on important issues and they wait until last minute to report on major issues. These new online journalism outlets are doing the back to basics approach to investigative journalism and are coming out with real important issues. The down side to investigative journalist is that they are mostly freelance writers and they don’t get paid for what they do. In the article there was a quote that stated, news should be free and that people should not have to pay to get there news or be paid to report it. I completely disagree with this because the reporters work hard to investigate and write the news that people need to know. Although the news is important the reporters who find the real important news should be compensated for it.
The web sites listed in the article get their money from donations because they are not for profit organizations. This makes it harder to pay for reporters so they hire freelancers to cover most of the articles. According to the article web site’s like the New haven independent don’t even run ads. These non-profit web site owners feel that journalism can be done without the big budgets I think that this is not true and because people need to get paid for the hard reporting that is done. At the same time I understand the idea of how the conglomerate news organizations have turned the news into a business rather that “the news.”
Online journalism should reinvent itself because big print and broadcast news has become more business like then actual news orientated investigative reporting stories. It should have real issues and actual investigative stories that people need to know about. Reporters should get paid for there work and hard investigations but it should not get out of hand and become a big business like it is in print and broadcast. Maybe news related web sites don’t even need ads like the New Haven Independent.org but I think it all depends on the site. Regardless of the way online journalism goes people are going to got to the site they get the most recent, accurate, and important information from. Investigative journalism is really important for these web sites because it’s what keeps people going to their sites. Since print and broadcast news are not always giving the investigative news these sites have an opportunity to gain a major position in the news department.
GREAT insight here.
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