That question of journalistic authenticity, though, has been in the news as Congress has debated a "shield law" designed to protect journalists from government prosecution — an outgrowth of the Obama administration's legal pursuit of people who leak and publish sensitive government information.
Without leaks, there would be little real journalism, by the way. And to government officials, everything is sensitive. Dick Durbin, that noted journalistic expert from Illinois, wrote that "we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive. An outraged Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor, rightly called Durbin a "constitutional ignoramus if he thinks that when the Framers talked about freedom of the press, they were talking about freedom for the press as an institution.
Reynolds' point is a good one: It's scary to think of the government as the final arbiter of what separates a real journalist from a fake one. It's typical of government to want to put everything in a box, which makes it so much easier to control, regulate and subsidize just another way to control it.
One of the big problems with the herd journalism often practiced in White House press corps or among those journalists "embedded" with the military, is that they curry favor with government officials lest they lose their access to information. Newspapers and other large media organizations often publish good journalism, but they often publish bad journalism also.
The media world has changed so dramatically with the Internet and cable TV and talk radio that these debates seem so arcane that only Congress can have them with a straight face. In the first two chapters I explain what I'm telling you right now. Journalism needs to become a citizen activity, something that everybody and anybody can adopt, a frame of mind.
A way to look into the world, that is partly scientific, because obviously you need to assess the quality of the information that you have.
But it is also partly design based, because you need to know how to present those facts to the public. And is also based on the skills of traditional journalism, which are still invaluable: how to write a story, how to create a good hierarchy in the information, how to present first the most important things and than the background information.
Those are the skills that journalists have developed throughout the years. Now it is time to bring these skills, the combination of those skills, to the world. Science needs to get out of its ivory tower. Scientific skills, they are not hard to learn. The scientific method is actually quite easy to explain and it is quite easy to apply.
So in the book I try to explain how to apply a scientific stance and how to apply science to your own life: don't jump to conclusions, test your own conclusion, stop for a minute, gather more data, compare this to that, take a look at the evidence. And after you do all that, then you make a decision.
That's science. Alberto Cairo: 'It is a visualization book. Because I explain all these things using examples that come from the world of visualization. It is a book written for visualization designers and for journalists, because I do believe people like you are an exception, people who have a training in data, who know how to play and to work with data.
You are an exception in the world of visualization nowadays. Many people who work in visualization today are graphic designers.
And they produce wonderful work. But in some cases they don't have the skills to assess the data critically before they represent it. He recommended that media organizations should implement revenue models that can be sustained through time. He mentioned Texas Tribune as a great example of a successful nonprofit. One of their main revenue streams is from organizing events. Journalists are becoming more entrepreneurial, but there are many challenges ahead, he said.
The funding issues have hit local newsrooms harder than national sites. While newsrooms, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, are doing well financially, smaller media outlets have laid off reporters and editors or shut down, leaving local communities with either no or less coverage, Mooney said.
Many people do "a bit of journalism" just as some do "a bit of politics" or "a bit of art". Some of them do it well. Some not so well. Some do journalism once a week for a national newspapers as part of a portfolio of creative activities, others do it sporadically for sparky, opinionated blogs which make little, if any, money. As an activity, journalism cannot and should not be licensed by the state or any professional body, any more than art or political protest should. Journalism is an activity which, when pursued with vigour and executed with skill in a spirit of disruptive yet creative mischief, should represent the antithesis of "professionalism", of regulation.
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