Our current business of journalism is dying an inevitable death and it isn’t soon enough.

The question is though can the journalists working today bring respectability and more importantly the trust factor back to the Fourth Estate; because as it stands right now it is being bankrupted by the very corporations that run it. We all poke electronic fingers of jest at posts by a large percentage of journalists being pushed into this electronic frontier for some of the things they say about their new medium; but we shouldn’t be.

A perfect example of this is the post on PC Mag by Lance Ulanoff about the demise of DRM being a bad thing which has resulted in him being made the most recent laughing stock by a number of bloggers and other journalists. Sure he may have made some pretty stupid points but he is no different from the large majority of journalists working today who are finding themselves being pushed into and writing about unfamiliar territory. These journalists are scared shitless because they are seeing their means to provide for their families being torn apart by the scary specter of technology.

The fact is that the days of real news disappeared the day that news became a commodity that corporations could make money from. News is being dictated by the decisions made in boardrooms instead of the editors desks where it belongs. You only have to look in the US to Fox News and even CNN to see this. News is being written to match political or boardroom philosophies - this isn’t news.

News business boardrooms are running scared as they see their revenue and share prices falling even to the point where the idea of asking for help from governments is floated as a way to postpone the inevitable. As Michael Arrington points out though in a post on this today the very idea of taking government dollars to prop up failing news businesses should be raising alarms all over the place

The idea is both dangerous and absurd. For Bollinger, who is a free speech advocate, to even consider the idea suggests he hasn’t thought through the consequences of the government financing the press. Freedom of the press is one of the most important checks on government. If they’re paying the bills, the press is no longer independent.

Print media is wonderful, and it would be a shame to ever see it fail. But these are businesses that need to sustain themselves in one way or another. Looking for a government handout to perpetuate a quaint but outdated way of life is the last resort of the desperate. It should be avoided at all costs.

Even as the conglomerates wave their arms around in despair the real news journalists are looking at a golden opportunity to bring respectability and trust back to the Fourth Estate. Mike Masnick touches on this in his post today where he says

That also means recognizing that the definition of “news” is different these days than it was in the past.

Any number of journalists from people like Om Malik to Mathew Ingram have grasped this evolution of the Fourth Estate and as a result these journalists have become respected voices in this new vanguard of news gathering and dissemination. I wouldn’t even want to guess at the fine line that journalists like Mathew must be walking as he; and others, deal with both the old perception of the news business and the new sharing of the news.

Journalists are facing both a scary time in their profession as well as a time that is full of promise. This is a time when news can once again become something we can place our trust in rather than constantly question the motives behind who is bringing it to us.

Conversation Tags: news, media, journalists