Journalism is Dead. Long Live Journalism.

I love social media.  Facebook is my window on the world, and the view includes beautiful scenery from British Columbia to Croatia, from Thailand to Lake Titicaca, fascinating architecture, great art, and lots and lots of cute animals.  I’m a bit sick of the cute  animals, honestly, but you have to take the bland with the awesome.

Exposure is good

One really great thing about social media is that stories which would not have seen the light of day in the past now get reported.  On my page today there was a story by a woman about her horrible, abusive mother – who is not in jail, who works as a teacher in a Florida public school.  Back when the professional media – newspapers and TV stations – ruled the roost,  this story might well have been brushed under the carpet.  Not any more.  There was recently a huge oil spill in Arkansas, but reporters were barred from the area.  That didn’t stop people from taking photos of the black, oozing swamp in their own backyards and posting them.  The Occupy Wall Street protests last year would never have caught on if it hadn’t been for facebook, and twitter, and YouTube spreading the word.  The lamestream media, as Sarah  Palin calls them (in one of the very rare instances where I agree with her about anything), certainly weren’t interested in covering it.  It had been going on for weeks and weeks before they started covering it at all.

A couple of other stories I think are being under-reported (although this is not really an example of social media v. old media – just a couple of stories I don’t think are getting the attention they deserve) are the hunger strike in Guantanamo ( shame, shame on Obama that that nightmare on Earth is still open) and the “topless Jihad” that was staged by the Ukrainian feminist group Femen.  Some Muslim women have objected, saying that we in the West don’t understand Islam and also worrying about a backlash.  I support Femen, though.  Anything that shines a light on the horrible repression of religion is good, in my eyes.  The fact that women can be stoned to death  for  adultery in many countries is totally unacceptable.  The world can’t ignore that.  The world can’t be allowed to ignore that.