Whenever I enter my photos into the server in the basement of the Journal World news center, Brett Garland, a photo editor, and I half pay attention to the O'Riley Factor on Fox News. He smirks and scoffs while I hold back my laughter. When I'm finished, I leave Garland to his musings and head upstairs to do the weather report.
It always amazed me how he could take the program seriously, but he is far from alone. Fox News is one of the most watched news sources in country and serves as a primetime example of an era of personalized news.
The largest platform for personalized news is the Internet. Yahoo offers personalized home pages featuring weather, horoscopes, headlines, individual comics, and whatever else the user is interested in. The quickest place to get whatever news one wants is usually the specific web page that specializes in the topic or the organization of interest's site. Can we really call this news?
The fact of the matter is, the people who depend on Yahoo news and organizational web pages are the type of people who probably never read the newspaper in the first place. They certainly didn't listen to NPR of watch the BBC to figure out what was actually going on in the world. There will be a place for reputable journalism amidst this neo-media, no matter how much personalized news is effortlessly available to us.
In short, I feel that, although the world of convenience news is a scary one, journalistic integrity will win out in the end. The type of yellow journalism found on Fox News and the set-it-and-forget-it convenience of internet news will fall short of people's expectations. After the audience has been thoroughly betrayed by misinformation, they will come whimpering back.
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