Bookmarking one's life

Many people keep their lives in a scrapbook of old photos. My mother also kept newspaper clippings. I shot some movies when I was in college and recorded videos of my children. Manuscripts that I wrote or published got put into manila folders.

Then the Internet came along, with a seemingly endless capacity to make a digital record of everything. My photos and videos went to this Google link and my those clippings and manuscripts were scanned to this link at Scribd.  I have numerous Twitter accounts and at least two Facebook accounts.

The videos are edited down considerably for viewability. I'm somewhat struck with the thought that life itself is easier to remember with a good deal of editing. Leave the bad memories on the cutting room floor.

Privacy is sometimes an issue for those who want to share their lives, but one's options are limited by public records. No one has to share their documents or photos/videos, but online directories make it easier to track strangers if you know their approximate age (and locale, if their name is too common). Armed with a little information, you can get a street address from whitepages.com and then an aerial or street-level photo from a mapping service like Google or Bing. Real estate records are public, so anyone can snoop the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, and square footage, plus the purchase price. That seems a lot more intrusive to me than photos of a birthday party, but it's difficult to opt-out of a satellite photo or withhold tax information from voters.

It's so hard to be private that choosing to be public is easy.

To:  aejmcpr@aol.com

What changes do journalism and mass communication programs need to make in order to stay relevant today? What do you see for the future of journalism and mass communication both in general and in higher education?

Journalism is ailing because it has lost the trust of its audience.  Surveys indicate a deteriorating public ranking of journalists, putting them in the neighborhood of used car salespeople and lawyers, and the reason is clear:  Journalism is no longer a watchdog, but a lapdog.  The public knows it.  When the talking points of one political party appear over and again in the actual-news-not-analysis stories of AP and CNN and the talking points of another party show up on Fox actual-news-not-analysis, something is horribly, terribly wrong.

It's not a matter of balance.  Giving both sides is a start, but not when every story has unnamed "critics say" lip service.  Viewers and readers want facts, not spin, but it's hard to find a straight story anymore, even in the so-called no-spin zone.  Moreover, the audience cannot find much real news -- mostly analysis instead -- on mainstream outlets of any stripe, so readers and viewers have had to make do with Internet aggregators.  Apparently J-schools are not teaching news gathering, but news mongering.

Educators can turn the ship around by teaching students to trust no one and dig deep.  Wanting to change the world is a miserable motivation for entering the journalism profession, but we give awards to journalists who give that very reason.  Scientists change the world, politicians change the world, educators change the world, but journalists report the changes that others make.  Most journalists have lost their way and the profession has lost its once-weighty esteem.  Telling the truth, even about sacred cows, will bring back respect for journalism.  Parroting the talking points of the DNC and the RNC will not.

Schools can help by encouraging students to nail down the one best, true picture of a story, not two sides ad nauseum forcing the audience to decide between two murky views. Take a stand based on what really happened.  Done correctly, the truth will scatter across all ideologies, one day liberal and the next day conservative. Stories should not get killed because they don't fit the ideological template of the news organization.  Stick to what happened:  Learn how to count the number of people who showed up for an event and report the percentage based on how many the venue potentially permitted. Label honestly those answers that evade the question. Train students to draw graphs with zero points, to avoid lying with statistics.  Better yet, insist that journalists fully understand math, all the way through calculus, and let the failures switch emphasis to public relations.  Better still, require a minor of substance (economics or history, not arts/humanities or political science) where the student demonstrates proficiency instead of passing grades.

Clearly the current model is broken.  Fix it.