Professional Clip 25: Geneva Overholser, What is Good Journalism?

Now, let us consider for a moment a more positive development—I bet we could use one—the proliferation of new means of communication. Given this development and the evident great public interest in information, then, this should be a positive moment for news media. And, indeed, the Internet in particular seems to me to offer enormous hope for democratization of the media. It used to be that the cost barrier for entry in the media was so high that publication was indeed a rare privilege, but the net has changed that. So why do I list this under my endless list of problems? Because it's journalism I'm worried about here, it's journalism I'm trying to bring to your attention, not information or communication generally. Journalism may appear in all different media, and certainly it appears online. But, the larger presence of a great deal of communication does not assure us journalism's health. Journalism: I'm talking about the kind of information that gets done only in organizations specifically devoted and willing to devote resources to finding out what is going on with an eye toward the public interest and disseminating it with a commitment to fairness and accuracy.