I so much feel the desire to invite us to spruce up our Internet journalism.
And I’m busily saying to myself: Why me? I have no advanced degree in journalism under my belt. It isn’t so much journalism I’m interested in, as a profession, as commentary. On what grounds do I speak out?
OK, OK, I’m awake again. No trips into the Third Dimension.
I have lots of grounds for commenting on Internet journalism. But one of the features of this kind of journalism is it’s open to everyone and readers decide what emerges. It isn’t persuaded by Ph.D’s, etc.
So I’ll take a stab at a Citizen-Journalist Etiquette. I may update the document as we go along.
I’m looking at the form and the content of our journalistic product.
Citizen-Journalist Etiquette
(1) Avoid memes. Memes reduce complex events and situations to mere slogans.
Memes are used to whip up online crowds. They militate against calm reflection and common sense.
One example is the Leftist Meme. Anyone in the so-called Left is tarred with the same brush as some utterly-criminal servants of the New World Order. Excuse me? How is that helping the situation?
Tarring anyone is bad enough, but we become animals when we respond to triggers like memes.
(2) Avoid gimmickry. Who is SABMYK? And does anyone care? What is contributed by a new gimmick such as this? We need to focus on the substantial as well as the accurate. Gimmicks are not substantial.
(3) Speak to a global audience. Sooner than we realize, media will cover the global beat. Ways of having whole societies express themselves will arise.
Because everyone will have a guaranteed basic income after NESARA (or before), there’ll be more incentive to form a news-sharing community rather than a profit-oriented news outlet.
Newspapers will be interactive, people writing up news of events they witness and posting videos and photographs, exactly as they do now on social media.
(4) Cite your sources. In your citation, provide the reader with enough information that they can go with minimal effort to your source (if still available). It’s impossible to keep the links in all your publications current and working. Library science hasn’t yet provided us with an answer to this one, as far as I know.