Real News

Real News:

How Thinking Like a Journalist Will Make You a More Interesting Person, Improve Your Life, and Help Save Democracy

by Pem McNerney

All too often, people say that they get their news from the internet.

They also might say they get their clothes from the clothing store, or their food from the grocery store, or their water from the faucet.

Of course you do.

But if that’s as far as you think about it, you’re going to pay what you pay and get what you get, regardless of whether it is good for you, your family, and your community, regardless of whether it reflects your values, and whether it is the best deal for your hard-earned money. How would you know if that water is safe to drink, if that food is safe to eat, and if that new shirt isn’t going to turn the rest of your laundry pink in the washer, and then shrink in the dryer?

The same is true for news. For as long as journalism has existed, it’s been important to not only know the source of that news, but to also know something about that source.

Andrew Pettegree, in The Invention of News, How the World Came to Know About Itself, notes that even as far back as the 11th century, that “a news report gained credibility from the reputation of the person who delivered it.” That was true when monasteries in rural Wales one hundred miles apart would exchange messengers every third year to share the news in the 11th century. It was true when a citizen in southern Germany wanted to get to the bottom of a rumor that his daughter left town in a hurry because she was pregnant in 1561. And it certainly was true at the end of the 18th century when newspapers started to come into their own as part of everyday life.

In this age of social media, memes, Russian trolls, and financially troubled news organizations that are under attack from detractors, that has never been truer than today.

But, with all the time many of us spend on social media, watching cat videos and two-year olds doing cooking videos, if can feel like actually reading the news takes too much time.

And so maybe we scroll through the headlines, post the headlines we find interesting to our news feeds to read later, and sometimes we go back and do that and sometimes we don’t. We assume that if it’s posted on the internet it must be true, even when it’s not.

That’s good habit to break.

Think about it and it’s clear that anyone on social media plays, to a certain extent, the role of a journalist, gathering information, creating stories, posting photographs, and passing all of that on to our friends and followers. That being the case, we all need to take more time to consider what it is we are posting and how we are influencing our friends.

Taking more time to do that, considering the source of that information, evaluating whether that source is trustworthy, deciding whether the story is really worth sharing and whether another point of view is worthwhile, and determining how that story should be shared is required, now more than it ever has.