Is the Internet killing investigative journalism?
Joshua Cohen, a Stanford professor of political science thinks so. AT CNET, Charles Cooper reports on a presentation by Cohen at a meeting discussing the impact of information technology on society:
The day started off with a rocking presentation by Joshua Cohen, a Stanford professor of political science. Alluding to the accelerating collapse of newspapers, he cautioned that the still-to-be-determined impact on the American polity will be anything but good.
“Here’s where there is a big problem,” he said, arguing that a “successful democratic sphere” is impossible without the information that newspapers supply. He added that “the damage is growing, and the consequences, potentially, are severe.”
I agree with Cohen. The bloggers are much too blithe in their assumption that they can gather and report information in the same way as our major newspapers. The truth is that much of the information on blogs is regurgitated from a few major news gathering sources.
Cohen is also reported as saying:
“The situation is getting urgent. Big newspapers are laying of about 20 percent of their investigative journalists,” he said. “This is a profession where people learn how to do it. There are standards. It would really be a disaster if this investigative profession went out of business, a disaster for democracy. There’s absolutely no reason to think that there’s a fundamental hostility between the future of investigative journalism and technology, but nobody’s figured it out yet.”
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