Things I grew up thinking about the media

Sometimes overwhelmingly it strikes me that other people did not grow up with journalists. As usual, there are people angry on Tumblr about a 'media conspiracy,' utterly outraged that something didn't spin the way it would in their ideal world. I usually abjectly fail to comprehend.

My mom, dad, and step-mom all have journalism degrees. All have worked extensively in print journalism, though none do anymore. They've collectively worked variously in PR (both before and after social media), political campaigns, television, online news coverage, editing (ranging from copy-editing daily newspapers to helping writers organize the content of their history books), and magazines. They imparted three important things:

1. Journalists lie.
2. Factcheck everything.
3. Don't watch Fox News.

Journalists lie.

Every journalist is a person, and people are subject to cognitive biases as well as personal bias. Journalists have a professional code of ethics, but it doesn't cover every circumstance, and journalists are still fallible. Some of them can't find sources who have accurate information, or can't do so by a pressing deadline. Some of them can't or don't find the sources for balanced coverage. Some of them have to work within editorial bounds that include political leaning. Some of them are Joel Stein.

Factcheck everything.
People get things wrong. People misapprehend. People read summaries and then try to summarize them and end up somewhere else completely. No matter how much you adore someone, unless your chief reason for adoring them is rigid and obsessive factchecking, be prepared to check their story before repeating it. Some things, a sanity check is most of what's needed: if a three-headed cow was really born in Nebraska, wouldn't it be more likely to be in an article in Agri-Chemical News than in The National Enquirer? Check as many sources as possible! I ran into an issue last week where I'd only read one news source for a thing, and it wasn't recent enough or comprehensive enough to actually give me the answer I was looking for, but I ended up repeating it anyway, and then retracting my statement and apologizing and feeling very silly.

Usually, I try to check two independent sources before I repeat or reblog (I'm on tumblr a lot these days) any kind of newsy thing. Like the persistent urban legend that Mister Rogers served in the military: no, he didn't. Try to get independent confirmation of things, try to get multiple sources, try to get firsthand accounts, try to get physical proof. The truth is important, and the story you tell with the truth is important.

Don't watch Fox News.
You know that first point about journalists? An important thing to keep in mind is that most of the people who talk on Fox are commentators and analysts and not actually journalists.

Fox lies. Fox fear-mongers. Fox wasn't allowed to broadcast in Canada until 2004, and even now broadcasters are required to monitor it and "abridge or curtail" any hate speech, because it is an active concern. Canada has standards about lying on air, and so Fox isn't allowed out without a leash on.

Fox is sometimes put on the same playing field as news agencies because they present themselves as the more right-leaning news option that is still totes reliable, yo. That's incorrect. There are tons and tons of articles out there enumerating the ways Fox has straight-up lied on air: find them. Check up on me. Factcheck. Just don't do it with The O'Reilly Factor on in the background.


These are the reasons I am dumbfounded when people point out that the story in the Saturday paper is different than the one in the Sunday paper and cry conspiracy or coverup: if it's a normal morning paper and the incident happened late late late Friday night, the journalist who wrote the story probably had an hour or less to find out what happened, get a statement from a witness, write the article, submit it to their copyeditor, and have it sent to Layout to make the deadline. Then they had all of Saturday! That means they got to talk to more people, maybe get a photographer by, and do their own factchecking.

This is mostly a ramble, but if there's anything I'd really like anyone to walk away with, it's that 'The Media' isn't a massive unified faceless machine: it's a few (disturbingly few, but that's a separate issues) corporations and a lot of Editors in Chief and even more journalists, all with slightly different agendas and all with varyingly applicable codes of ethics. The best, and ultimately only, thing you can do to further pursue truth is to think critically about everything.

Networking

A friend of mine just expressed confusion on the usefulness of networking. It can be a foreign concept if one doesn't live in the world of social media, which was surprising to me, since I've lived in social media for the last few years. Social media is networking applied on a wider scale; you're making contacts, but with more people. It is one of the most important aspects of business, but it doesn't have to be scary and insurmountable to get into. Even a Twitter account can let you follow companies relevant to your industry without much time commitment or technical know-how.

Online Security

Reading articles about Google, particularly Buzz and the problems blogger Harriet Jacobs faced, brings home a lot of the attitude shift that has come with a lot of new internet technology. At the beginning of the noughties, the internet was seen as a foggy area full of malicious predators, and one was supposed to never, ever share information about one's real life - address, phone number, and real name were all taboo. Then came social networking; we found our friends on sites like Facebook and Myspace, and now we search for new business contacts that way. And on our profiles, like the Google profile, there are blanks just begging to be filled with all of our email accounts and IM accounts and address. And if you have the Android operating system on your phone, you can have it tag your updates with your exact GPS.

If one has a network of only close friends, family, and business contacts, that might not be such a bad idea, but when one is using the internet for prospecting business contacts, or has a wider social network, it becomes an issue of balance. You want new prospective clients to be able to contact you, but not to know where you live. I think I've found what works for me; my city and my email are everywhere, my age on some things, and my real name, while my offline contact information is kept private. But my business is conducted largely online or in an office, where it's the office and not my personal information being used as contact. Business-people in different fields, especially writing and editing, where marketing of yourself matters so much, need to find their own balance, and one that takes into account every tool they put out there. If you want to be anonymous, putting your full name and address into your gmail (and in turn your Google profile), might not be the route for you, whereas if you want to be highly public, you don't want different nicknames and out-of-date information on every account.

So check your settings, and google yourself so you find what other people can find about you. Make sure it's what you want them to be able to find. I'm off to check my Facebook privacy settings.

The Many Wonders of Social Media

Today I got to give a mini-tutorial on Twitter at my workplace, and talk about the benefits of it for a business. It's exciting to have it branching out in different ways; this started as a simple question of publicity for an upcoming event.

Twitter really is a necessity for any business or business-person; there are a growing number of businesses advertising positions on Twitter, sometimes exclusively. And with news sites, retweets, and the ability to sort into timelines, it is a growing Internet hub.

Social Media Packaging

It's quite a paradigm shift, reading about social media in articles like this one. I've been on networking sites of various kinds since early in high school; at that point, we were the young end of the target audience, and it was a good way to find and make friends with and procrastinate on homework by talking to people all around the world with similar interests. Now, as I'm becoming a young professional, and looking for ways to reach my target audience, I'm encountering all of this information and excitement about the uses of social media for professional networking. And I realized; I can do this. I had to be kicked off Facebook late at night in high school, and I had a Twitter to follow some of my favorite comic artists. But the approach was new, the view of it as a real professional tool and not just a way to keep in touch with friends half way around the globe. It really is an exciting thing, altering my views and approaches to keep up with this wave.