Well, I don’t know you personally. I’m saying anybody who has to fact-check the uncited claims made in news articles, and thus is an acting journalist is statistically very likely to be extremely unqualified for the job.
Which explains a lot of how the 21st century is going, honestly.
[…] I’m saying anybody who has to fact-check the uncited claims made in news articles, and thus is an acting journalist is statistically very likely to be extremely unqualified for the job. […]
What, in your opinion, would determine if someone is qualified to fact check a news article? Do you have criteria?
Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.
There’s the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.
There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.
[…] I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media […]
You, then, clarified that:
[…] a journalist would often be expected to get in touch with a source directly, which is not feasible if we’re all doing it.
If you are referring to the original root source (assuming that it’s, for example, a conversation with someone), to me, that reads like you are saying that a journalist can’t cite the report by another journalist who first interviewed that source (ie novel information), and that each journalist needs to independently interview the source themselves in a novel way.
Okay, well I don’t exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don’t exactly follow the usage of your language “supposed to”. Imo, one needn’t be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.
Are you saying that I’m unqualified to be a journalist?
Well, I don’t know you personally. I’m saying anybody who has to fact-check the uncited claims made in news articles, and thus is an acting journalist is statistically very likely to be extremely unqualified for the job.
Which explains a lot of how the 21st century is going, honestly.
What, in your opinion, would determine if someone is qualified to fact check a news article? Do you have criteria?
Like I said, we should get research methods taught in school from very early on. For one thing, understanding what even counts as a source is not a trivial problem, let alone an independent source, let alone a credible independent source.
There’s the mechanics of sourcing things (from home and on a computer, I presume we don’t want every private citizen to be making phone calls to verify every claim they come across in social media), a basic understanding of archival and how to get access to it and either a light understanding of the subject matter or how to get access to somebody who has it.
There’s a reason it’s supposed to be a full time job, but you can definitely teach kids enough of the basics to both assess the quality of what they come across and how to mitigate the worst of it. In all seriousness.
Can you clarify exactly what you are referring to here?
Well, a journalist would often be expected to get in touch with a source directly, which is not feasible if we’re all doing it.
I’ll grant you, it very often doesn’t happen, but still.
Are you saying that journalism only deals in novel information?
No. Not sure how you get that from the quote.
Let me try to clarify my thinking:
You stated this:
You, then, clarified that:
If you are referring to the original root source (assuming that it’s, for example, a conversation with someone), to me, that reads like you are saying that a journalist can’t cite the report by another journalist who first interviewed that source (ie novel information), and that each journalist needs to independently interview the source themselves in a novel way.
For clarity, by “it” are you referring to journalism?
I’m assuming you’re in a microblogging flavor of federation and that’s why this is broken down into a bunch of posts?
Yes, I’m referring to journalism.
Okay, well I don’t exactly follow the relevance of your claim that journalism can be practiced full-time. I also don’t exactly follow the usage of your language “supposed to”. Imo, one needn’t be a full-time journalist to practice journalism.
You can do journalism without working as a journalist, but there is a lot of work involved in doing good journalism, which I presume would be the goal.
If you think the workload is trivial, consider the posibility you may not have a full view of everything that is involved. I’m saying everybody can and should have enough knowledge to sus out whether a piece of info they see online or in a news outlet is incorrect, misleading or opinionated, but it’s not reasonable, efficient or practical to expect everybody to access their news like a professional journalist does.
I think you might be misunderstanding me — I’m not of the opinion that the workload for journalism is trivial. All I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s necessary to work full-time as a journalist (ie in a career capacity) to do the work of a journalist. I think there may be a miscommunication of definitions for things like “journalism”, “full-time”.