Frontline Documentary

After watching this documentary, I have to say that I agree with most of the ideas introduced.

Jeff Jarvis said that most bloggers are people talking, but not real journalist -though they can be real journalists if they chose. Then the president of the journalism school at Columbia compared citizen journalists to church newsletter writers. I agree with Jarvis when he said that most bloggers are just talking, but can be real journalists. I think if a blogger holds themselves to the same standards that journalists are held to and wants to report the things happening around them in the same way a newspaper journalists do, then I think bloggers can (and should) be taken serious.

Connected to the idea of serious journalism v. blogger is also the battle of serious news v. "serious news". They talk about this in the first and second segments. One of the guys interviewed at the Daily Show said that their success is more the main news stations failing. I'll admit that I love watching the Daily show and the Colbert Report because it puts a satirical spin on the news. They play off people's need to be entertained, just as regular news stations are now doing (but in a much better way). Frontline highlights many news stations and the commentary that now fills them. With the 24 hours news cycle and with people wanting more entertainment than actual news, commentary has become incredibly prominent -and some people can't tell the difference anymore.

I also found interesting the segments on the LA Times. Someone pointed out that there are 3 national news papers that have found the niche that works: The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post and there doesn't need to be any others. I stand with the LA Times on this. You can't have just national newspapers to cover everything people are interested or what matters. Local newspapers -no matter how big or small- need to survive to report the "smaller" local news. I loved the segment on hyperlocalism. Since most newspapers are moving to the Internet, having multimedia on local newspaper media sites that focus on small communities. The idea of getting information about a city/town/community through the local newspaper website is interesting and possibly a way to get people back to newspapers -even if it's online "papers" instead of actual printed ones.