I've been a little behind in my classes lately (all semester) and I'm just now getting to the spring break readings for this journalism class. This particular article, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, is unusually long. Needless to say I don't have the entire article memorized, or even remember the entire thing, but one aspect did stick out for me.
The article mentions that today, and in the future, journalism will need to be financed by alternative means, and stop relying on advertising. The article suggested that in the future one of these alternative means will be the government.
Maybe I'm honing in a tiny detail in a huge article, but that proposal caught me a little off guard. You may have heard of the idea that the government help to finance some journalistic endeavors, but I hadn't. It goes against a lot of what I learned both recently and through high school. Journalism is supposed to be a sort of watchdog for the government, holding it accountable for its actions. Can the news industry really fulfill that responsibility if its partially funded by the government? It seems like a conflict of interest.
If anyone in class is still reading this blog (I know, the semester is dragging on, projects are due, finals are around the corner, I've been lagging myself) what do you think? The proposal surprised me, did it surprise anyone else?
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