A journalist I admire, Bill McCloskey, former AP reporter in DC, who spoke at the recent Public Relations Society of America conference last week, urged us to join the Society of Professional Journalists, and I am going to do so. I am also planning to get behind any PRSA campaigns aimed at supporting professional journalism standards. We need to become a more media-savvy culture and support reporters who are independent, thoughtful and checking their sources and facts. Much online media content is generated by trained reporters who have simply moved from print to online, but there is much more that are simply opinions, or just plain junk. Everyone is just selecting what they want to hear or what is entertaining.

Bill said the journ schools are as popular as ever, but where will their jobs be? Are schools also producing  thoughtful readers seeking a variety of references and perspectives?

Social media is all fine and well, but it shouldn’t remove the line between professional and social activity. Women should especially heed the fact that most female professionals only began to be taken seriously in the worlds of business, science, media and technology in the mid-to late-70s. Let’s not reverse the work of those who entered the workforce before us and fought hard for better positions by now being too casual in all of our online presentation. I personally don’t care what hobbies you have taken up, where you are shopping for clothes or how far you drive to an event, especially if you are entering my work space. I especially do not like it when vendors who are late on projects send me their casual tweets while I am waiting for their project deadline to be met.

I usually look at the glass half full, but something about new media’s potential effect on American society leaves me feeling more empty.

I find myself seeking out the NBC network news at 7 with Brian Williams, or the BBC or national public television …looking for that feeling of belonging that I had watching Walter Cronkite when I was a kid. He was speaking to all of us as a united nation with common interests and desires for our common good. While I love the creativity that new media unleashes, and the opportunity it gives for expression of all kinds from anyone, anywhere, I hope that some avenues of professional journalistic reporting remain to bring us together for messages we may not want to hear but need to hear. Where will the objective reporting coming from?

Paul Saffo said it best in a recent Economist.com article…. a futurologist described as “one of the world’s most enthusiastic technophiles,” said that on the downside, “Each of us can create our own personal-media walled garden that surrounds us with comforting,
confirming information and utterly shuts out anything that conflicts with our world view,” he says. “This is social dynamite” and could lead to “the erosion of the intellectual commons holding society together…We risk huddling into tribes defined by shared prejudices.”

Aren’t we doing this already? What do you think?

For two years now I have gone to bed at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. expecting to find a summary of world news on cable TV networks, but I felt disappointed—in fact, starved for news. I’ll admit it, I am a news junky.

If you are reading this post, perhaps you did the same thing. But, we were looking for news in all the wrong places.

I was not satisfied to watch every network cover the same tasteless details over and over again …celebrities in and out of detox, missing people, talking heads or You Tube re-runs..

I never learned anything new.

I started going around complaining about it. People pointed to the Web but my only access was in the office and I had left there. Then, after a recent tour of CNN with my daughter, the guide said most of their viewers are getting their news from CNN’s web site, not from television broadcasts. It was an “aha” moment. I must turn to the Web if I want more than People magazine or tabloid type content. Here I am!

Can you recommend any good blogs for world news?