The middleman vs. the Web

In three months, my journalism degree and I will be unloosed upon the world in all our glory. In three months, I'll start worrying in earnest about finding a job in my field. And hey, the Web is the place to be! It's the hip news medium of the future, right? That's what I keep hearing, anyway. But what if my brilliant career as an online journalist is doomed from the get-go because of the Web's very nature as an interactive medium? Will the unwashed masses eventually figure out that they don't need us and start producing the news themselves? Gasp! What a horrible thought!

Yeah, and probably one that will never be a total reality. Let's face it; no matter how important citizen journalism is (and I do think it's important to our media landscape), people have come to expect certain standards as far as content and writing quality go. No one wants to read text that looks like a bunch of preteens chatting on their Myspace pages except for those preteens (believe me, every time I time I end up at a site with writing like that I click the "back" button post-haste).

One of the Web's great strengths -- that of allowing any and everyone to become a writer and post their work for all to see -- therefore, is also one of its great weaknesses. It doesn't have a copy editor. It doesn't have someone to run around verifying facts, spellings and math for it. The Web also has a convenient screen of anonymity. That person claiming to be a lawyer, doctor or what-have-you might be telling the truth, or he might be Joe Jackson sitting in his basement wearing fluffy bunny slippers. So in the end, who are you going to believe? The guy in the slippers, or the people who get paid to get it right and are fired if they get it wrong or fake it? I'd answer the latter, every time.