The full effects of the new-media revolution are still playing out, but there is no doubt that the rise of, initially, blogs, and then all the other forms of social media, raise some fundamental questions about how journalism is done.
Reading through some of the coverage of Tony Abbott’s national security speech on Monday, for example, we can compare what we might call traditional journalism with newer, more adventurous approaches.
Consider these extracts from articles by well-established political journalists.
The first is from something Michelle Grattan wrote in The Conversation …
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And here is an extract from something Lenore Taylor wrote on the same topic in a piece for The Guardian:
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The Grattan piece is an old-fashioned, straightforward news report, trying to objectively recount the event. The Taylor piece is labelled analysis, but it provides the same basic detail. The difference is, Taylor’s piece tries to put the Prime Minister’s comments into context in a way that Grattan’s doesn’t.
As such, Taylor’s piece could be said to stray over into the area of comment and thus be considered much more subjective. Some (not me) might even accuse her of bias.
On the surface, Grattan avoids charges of personal comment and bias, but here’s the point: I would argue her approach is much less useful to us as citizens than is Taylor’s.
Let me explain why …
Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for a number of publications. You can follow him on Twitter.
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