This was not quite surprising.
In fact I was expecting this.
Well not totally but a bit.
We’ve heard so much about how Rappler, has usually been the first to break news in social networking sites.
It had gained a lot of readers and followers through social media. For a long time it had made a cyberspace noise.
Much more did it made noise when recently, the site admitted to have committed plagiarism through one of its writers who had lifted information from an article published in Interaksyon.com without citing it.
Our professor in one of my journalism class told us that Rappler repeatedly done similar incidents of forgetting to attribute sources of their news even if it had been quite obvious that they were really not one of the first sites to get the information.
For a lot of articles it might not be that obvious, but since the article from interaksyon.com had committed mistakes, the Rappler article had been seen with the same mistakes. Of course no one believed that it was a perfect coincidence for that to appear and so the news site admitted their fault.
I was not surprised quite frankly because of how some of magazine and online writers had become because of the fast-paced virtue of the world wide web. The heavy influx of information all over the internet requires a whole lot of originality. If your piece is not original enough, no attention deserves it. To be original online needs to have had delivered the information first. Pressure of news breaking, the lack of attention by the editors and the absence of putting journalism as a profession at heart clearly turned such bad writing.
This should not be a different story from how society views journalism.
When asked about what course will a person pursue for college, many would likely be amazed if it had been engineering or courses of the hard sciences. However when journalism or communication courses be included, a lot would boldly insist that the latter courses mentioned were as easy as pie. Society would typically perceive writing as a simple craft. People automatically degrades the art of writing as something that anybody can do even if past asleep or with eyes shut.
The profession of writing that is highly regarded by the scholastic world are overpowered by the average members of society who are prospective targets of the media industry.
The rise in information created and disseminated through various available medium caused the influx of writers who has little or no educational background about journalism to increase. Editors and writers develop a habit of irresponsibility and neglecting accountability to the readers. Viewing the craft as a job and not as art, as a source of income and not as a profession, as a step to prestige and not as a vocation led to the mediocrity and absence of conscience of writers.
Journalism is never easy. Mere construction of sentences is. But writing a story framed in a certain angle, gathering relevant info, verification and looking for the story is way harder than you thought. It’s a lifestyle more of a job. One cannot study such principles overnight. You put all hard work to publish a single story and handle the underlying pressures before, during and after doing such.
A few have survived and continuously surviving real journalism. Others just think they are doing it but they’re not.
And you still think most of the time you’re getting your information today in a smooth and flawless manner? Think again.
You might get fooled of masks. Masks of popularity and trend that is 😉
Pilgrim of Sanity 