Blog #1

“But what newspapers do, better than any other medium, is deliver information in an unbeatable, retrievable, storable form.”

Ford discusses the argument that many people believe newspapers are dead. Her first argument against those who believe that revolves around the fact that Internet users don’t pay for news. She explains that newspaper readers don’t pay for the content but rather they pay for the delivery. The content is survives and is paid for by the advertisers who place ads throughout the newspapers. Moving forward, Ford quotes a professional who explains that journalism is needed in society, not newspapers. The primary argument of the article is that society needs reputable journalism, which readers can distinguish between in print newspapers compared to the Internet. For example, The New York Timesdoesn’t print the same type of content as People or National Enquirer. Ford states, that the Internet has not yet delivered “reputable journalism on its own,” and that newspapers have had centuries of existence in the mass market to gain a good reputation of journalism. Reacting to this article, I found that although I am a fan of the online, easy access news, when it comes to “real” journalism, I seek out printed versions of The New York Times or The Philadelphia Inquirer. With the high rate of hackers and availability to anyone to edit content, I don’t fully trust many online news sources.

In James Carey’s article, he discusses the craftsmanship, creativeness, and poetry of journalism. The very first sentence explains that “journalists are the writers of stories and, after hours, tellers of stories,” but they are much more than that as Carey portrays in his descriptions of use of language, construction of sentences, etc. First discussing the lead of an important article, he explains that in good journalism, the lead represents “a profound collaboration between the writer and his audience.” Continuing past the description of crafting good journalism, Carey describes some problems within American journalism. He refers to the fact that students merely take an introductory course to journalism and see it as the entire curriculum with nothing else to learn or expand on. Carey describes American journalism to have been shaped further by not the actual curriculum but by such things as the economy and politics. According to Carey, American journalism relies heavily on “motives for explanations” and that many stories contain language, terms, and meanings that only “constant readers” can understand. Carey explains that both the "why" and the "how" of journalism are also problematic within American journalism. These being the hardest to describe, Carey states that readers crave the "why" just as much as any other element. The idea of fast and separated news, according to Carey, makes the content hard to connect; it is "disconnected and incoherent."