Journalists can't keep up with the web

CANADIAN JOURNALISM IS IN CRISIS, says a Canadian journalist who blames the Internet for a decline in quality news reporting, adding that hacks are too busy cutting and pasting from each other to generate any genuine new news.

"In the space of a daily news cycle, it is virtually impossible for one reporter to do an adequate job on a television news item, a newspaper story, a web story, even covering a routine press conference," says Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

"There is far less time to consult a variety of views, to verify information, to treat sources critically, to understand background and context, to track down documents and to explain the information in the clearest and most useful way to readers and viewers," she reckons. "There is certainly no time left to do some old-fashioned digging, following up on tips or courting sources, the kind of gumshoe reporting that often yields the groundbreaking stories.

"Repurposing content doesn't count as diversity. Taking newspaper content, for example, and rewriting it for a free daily, putting it up on the web or interviewing the newspaper reporter on the evening news is not diversity of content. It is the same content regurgitated through the various platforms. It is the same interviews and facts, the same reporter's interpretations, and, yes, even the same reporter's mistakes."

Another observer observed: "I would say the quality of news is appalling on commercial radio in Canada. It's almost non-existent… to look at the quality of it, in my view, it's shocking." µ

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