The opinions represented in this article do not necessarily represent those of the staff of CUIndependent.com nor any of its sponsors.
Dave Taylor makes my blood boil.
Taylor was a guest speaker in my JOUR 4321, Media Institutions and Economics class on Monday morning. He visited to speak with us about the world of blogging and its significance to the future of journalism.
He writes four blogs himself, namely The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film and Attachment Parenting Blog. His education includes an undergraduate degree in computer science with a minor in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, a master’s degree in educational computing from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and an online MBA from the University of Baltimore.
I know this information to be factually accurate, because I have done my research, something Taylor does not appear to value.
His argument in his presentation to my class was that we should all be writing every day in order to adequately prepare ourselves for careers in the ever-evolving field of journalism. This writing, Taylor said, could consist of blogs, Facebook notes and Twitter messages.
It is here that I must be very clear about my opinion on Dave Taylor’s perspective of journalism. Updating a blog daily does not qualify anyone to call himself or herself a journalist.
Blog posts do not demand the same work as newspaper articles do, and bloggers and avid updaters of Facebook and Twitter don’t have to be educated to the extent that professional writers of news do. Therefore, bloggers cannot necessarily be considered to be journalists.
Blogs can be written without interviews, attribution, fact checking, editing and the like. If I were to ask a blogger to check a fact or amend a story according to AP Style, he or she may or may not know what I was referring to. A journalist would always know what I was referring to.
Taylor’s blog post about his visit to our class is the perfect example of everything blogs lack when it comes to being reliable sources of information.
His post is blatantly biased and packed with fact errors. In fact, it begins with a fact error in its lede. Taylor asserted that his visit on Monday morning was to a class of graduating seniors–a group that I am not a part of. Another inaccuracy appears in the third graph. He refers to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication as a department. As the name would suggest, it is in fact not a department, but rather a school.
The room that social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter allow for bias and fact errors has no place in journalism because it is harmful. News articles must relay information that is correct and they must be fair and balanced. And I mean fair and balanced in the literal sense, not the Rupert Murdoch sense. Any other approach is dangerous. Taylor’s blog post is dangerous.
After speaking with a small class here at CU for 50 minutes, Taylor had the nerve to attack every journalism student’s ability to enter the workforce as a mindful, productive and successful worker.
How dare he. This is upsetting to me not only because he made sweeping generalizations about me and my peers, but because he is a hypocrite.
According to the official Strategic Plan of the journalism school for August 2009 to May 2013, “The School of Journalism and Mass Communication believes that a well-informed public is the basis of democracy and that media are responsible for providing the information and critical analysis the public requires, to think and act responsibly.” I feel these principles have been instilled in me as a news-editorial major and it infuriates me that Taylor’s carelessness has misrepresented the entire community that consists of me and my peers. I challenge anyone to explain to me how he is being informative to the masses.
I am concerned as a journalist that Taylor sincerely believes he is taking part in paving the way to the future of journalism. I will argue until the day I die that my work here in the journalism school and with the CU Independent is more significant than his diary entries.
Taylor never mentioned that two editors for the CU Independent were in attendance for his talk on Monday morning. He never asked any of us if we were involved with the school paper. In fact, he inaccurately referred to the paper as the Colorado Daily and moved on with the rest of his blabber.
Mr. Taylor, I would like to tell you that all of the student staff members at the CU:I, not to be confused with any other publication, are here to teach you how to be a journalist when you are ready to hear what we have to say. You certainly have a lot to learn.
Contact CU Independent Deadline News Editor Sara Morrey at Sara.morrey@colorado.edu.
4 comments
Hear, hear!
Perfectly argued, well-written, and to the point. YES. I agreed with you before I read it and now even more so, if that’s possible.
Thanks for the continued exploration of the topic I was bringing up, Sara, but I fear you might do yourself and your publication a disservice when you don’t adequately differentiate between whether I was aiming for journalistic reporting or a more informal shoot-from-the-hip opinion and analysis. You are exhibiting the same “my way or the wrong way” thinking that I believe made many of the comments on my blog rather tedious and, well, a bit sophomoric (e.g. “that cross must be getting heavy”).
You had two people from the CU Independent in the class, yet when I asked if anyone blogged or wrote for the online publication of any sort only one person raised their hand? I will stick with the observation I made: a class on journalism and mass communications, a class of seniors less than two months away from graduation, should have more than one out of 25 students writing with some frequency for the online world. If people were shy and in fact almost everyone in the room is contributing a blog or online publication, mea culpa, I’ll apologize and feel much better about CU’s School or Journalism and Mass Communication.
You can shoot the messenger, you can talk about how I don’t exhibit “journalistic training”, that’s fine. But you can look at any number of trends in the newspaper business (as an example) to see how the world is turning away from traditional journalism and towards blogs, online reporting and opinion, and yes, highly opinionated writers who don’t have any formal training at all.
I knew we’d lost the thread of what I wanted to discuss, when I was accused of not writing frequently enough to develop good grammar. At that point I gave up on the conversation. Let’s hope this doesn’t similarly devolve.
Oh, and did you know that I asked whether I could attend senior presentations so I could learn more about what’s going on in the department, and whether I could meet some of the students doing great stuff, and was summarily – and rudely – rejected? It’s hard to fact check, and hard to post a retraction or update, if all I get is the rhetoric of a few, don’t you think?
My core point remains: are CU Journalism students learning how to be successful in the extraordinarily fluid world of online/print hybrids and blogs? I’m listening. Here’s a fact I’d like to see: what percentage of students are employed in the field 90 days after graduation?
It seems to me that so many people are heading toward opinionated blogs instead of fact-based journalism because they do indeed have a “my way or the highway” attitude, and they’d rather read things with which they agree 100% than the facts which may challenge them to think outside their ideological bubbles.