Liberation through Digitization

Digital publishing is a miracle for public information. People seeking to be journalists are no longer at the mercy of worrying about getting published in a newspaper or magazine to be heard. Passionate individuals can report on the happenings in their local town or provide insight on a national story. The huge expansion of sources also causes a web of checks and balances. The range of motivation behind investigation is sprawled and the fallacy of capitalistic journalism is negated. While still true that in mass the media giants still hold domain, the availability to seek out truth remains.

Non-profit journalism is a combatant against ratings driven news. The problem is that funding is still required which is acquired typically through donations. The fragile base makes said institutions just as prone to flaws of their counter-parts. It is the individual blogger who is free of constraints to have to satisfy some outside entity. Hobbyists who only seek to better the world around themselves by pulling back the shroud. One could argue that they too are only motivated by attention seeking behavior. Sometimes it could actually be for profit by sensationalizing a story for more hits on your website, or it could just be for the sake of having more readers. However this cannot always be the case and it will be the journalists without all the previously stated constraints with the least bias to draw from when they write.

Overall the internet stands to improve journalistic integrity across the board. More power belongs to the audience. The margin of error for printing falsity is so much slimmer. By keeping large organizations up to their own standards, a better tomorrow can be looked forward to. The key to a fully functioning system is transparency, which is what journalism offers and what the internet can ensure.

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