The Perspective of Modern Journalism Decoded

If it isn’t obvious, I’m a blogger. I write posts for the internet that are read by people all around the world, and I keep it updated weekly. I have archives which are still visited from years back, some of which I’m even surprised are still being read. I even (as of recently) have put ads on my website, which I was not entirely proud of, but figured it was worth a shot. So, am I a journalist? I have all the qualifications as any other website that brings media to a demographic via posts (articles) and I have sponsorship built into the website that gives me whatever I need to make my site look the best that it can, which is not always easily done. So do I count as a journalist along the lines of those working at say, Breitbart.com, NYTimes.com, or even the Huffington Post? I believe so, and here’s why: Firstly, I know there are absolutely no true comparisons to myself and the above mentioned websites, but I do have something in common with them that most people fail to forget: my website is about taking multimedia information to a targeted demographic, and having that spread out through multiple devices, like Twitter, or Pinterest, but mostly through advertising through social media, and affiliates of my site (Google, Blogger, etc.) I could even use video-sharing to get more of an audience, the possibilities are endless. Another issue I see with the current generation of journalism is the use of opinionated writing, rather than hard-lined facts with no serious bias. Very robotic writing that once used to plague every “grandpa” paper that existed back in the days of printed news. Let’s face it: aside from lining our bird cages, do we actually have a use for newspapers? (Random thought: why hasn’t someone become a billionaire yet selling newspaper paper without print on it as bird cage lining for cheap? That alone would be the final nail in the coffin for printed news. If you think I’m insane for stressing that point, I guarantee whoever reads this first has just become a multimillionaire). Again, opinions in the news are now the standard; everyone has to put in their slanted view to every single story, and not even ironically, it is considered the norm, and I do blame the likes of digital media, and television news for this trend. Granted, the news was always a bit bias, even back before the Internet was just a prenatal fetus in the womb of the digital mainstream. Yet, back then it was a bit harder to catch, or at the very least they weren’t so blatantly political. I’m all for an exchange of ideas, I love analytical commentary, but do you really have to explain why the Senate is full of crooks, and Obamacare is the end of civilization when it comes to a story about a cat stuck in a tree? Do I really have to hear that on a daily basis? No thank you! If this is the first time you’re reading this blog, thank you for the support, and welcome! I hope you’ll come back, and click on every single ad you see now a billion times over (I’m kidding, obviously) but here’s the deal, the one thing that separates my modest little site that is in the dark crevices of the Internet, and Big Print that makes me look like an ant. My form of journalism is completely editorial, no filler whatsoever…or all filler, however you view modern journalism. Yes, I do believe myself to be a journalist, and why not? Have you seen the trash they print? They refuse to even use spell check anymore! They don’t even let the keyboard cool down before the article is put up online without even a fact check behind it! Why not be honest and call news as it is today what it truly is: theater without the Playbill. When I was younger, I always wanted to be a writer, and thanks the to the internet, I now have the luxury of being read all around the world. I’m extremely humbled by that honor, and realistically, twenty years ago, when a young eight-year-old boy was still learning how write a proper story, that would have been the pinnacle of my life. Today, that is just start for most writers, and it shows just how far we’ve come as a society. Writing was my dream, but multimedia has become my goal. I truly am humble for every single reader I receive, and I know I pronounce it ad-nauseum in nearly every single blog post I put up, but that’s what separates me again from my Big Print counterpart: I’m human, and I know without all of you, those who have been here for nearly ten years, I’d not be doing this weekly. Nowadays we write on tablets by pressing fingers to touch-sensitive glass, we can use phones to take digital pictures on the spot of any major newsbreak. We are the media today, and that makes us something greater than the Old Media, because we do it with a humanity that has been loss, and with a power that can topple dictatorships, and even start a revolution that splits a country in two. I find myself looking to blogs for information more often than I do newspapers. Twitter has become the best tool for finding information, because I can read all the newspapers I admire at once, plus blogs that I’ve been reading for years, and why not? That is the great thing about technology isn’t it? Get what you want as fast as you want, no filler? Without Twitter, and Monday Blogs, my blog would still be floating around in the digital mainframe, lost amongst more than a trillion upcoming blogs from hundred of countries. Freedom of speech is spread so far and wide, that tyranny could never stifle it, and that also means that the powers that be in Big Print are always going to deny the likes of little old me, but they fail to forget that they will either adapt to the new ways, or fall backwards into primordial stew, fossilizing, and thrown into museums of yesteryear media. I consider myself a journalist, even though that’s a bad word these days, I respect its connotations. I believe my site brings people enjoyment, informative entertainment that would rather have been filled by something perhaps less productive, like cat videos. (I am not against cat videos, who doesn’t love cats, right?) but still, I try to give my insight (product) to those willing to listen, and I know that is all I can offer in this field. What else would you want? Journalism today is about learning how to write for the media of television, papers, blogs, and on the rarest occasion: forums. Then you relearn everything (or in most cases, forget everything you learn) and then you go off to a dying medium that most people have lost their trust in, because the media was once a check on the lies and deceits that come from the mouths of politicians, businessmen, and so-called “freedom fighters”. They never had an agenda, because they used to care about exposing the truth, no matter how decrepit, disgusting, how horrific it may be. They weren’t afraid to go into war zones and risk their lives to make sure you saw the horrors of battle, in hopes we never have to go through that trauma again. Today, they do commentary on the president blowing his nose, or pouring a beer that overflows, or a former First Lady having a shoe thrown at her head. This is why I people like Edward Snowden are true heroes to me, and the talking head on the screen that brings me news about cats that can tap dance are faces of teeth that wouldn’t know a breaking news story if it cracked them right in that manufactured pearly white mandible of theirs. Edward Snowden forced the news to do its job, and it got America talking about our rights, and how we’ve been asleep so long that they’ve disappeared from right underneath our oblivious feet some night long ago. I bet that I could talk to most high school students, and they couldn’t tell me who the hell Sojourner Truth was, but I guarantee they at least would nod like comatose tech zombies if I muttered the syllables Edward Snowden. Media has been dying for years, because we have become the commune of media: with blogs becoming more noteworthy than newspapers, Twitter being better than a ticker at the bottom of the corporate newscasts (the only redeeming quality their was for television news) why not declare myself a journalist? I have been through the channels most people go through to become a journalist, or to work in a news studio, but I saw the future of the internet being the true media, and unless something greater comes along, or an EMP puts us back to the days of Johannes Gutenberg, there is no need for Old Media. People have to now do research, where they just obeyed their corporate headmasters of the past, and took every word coming out of the pretty person’s mouth for truth. We now search out news, because it comes from the source we can best relate to: ourselves. Journalism is now our scapegoat, it will always come under scrutiny, because we have never before in our history had such a distrust in both our politicians, and the corporate mongers who are in their pockets in the news media. Obviously I am not a news blogger, because I have a soul, and I know that there is no pleasing half a nation, so I try my best to avoid politics, and I don’t always do that well, but I try. Besides, I find it’s unfair for my international readers who are clearly not going to care as much for American news. So I speak the international language of digital media. I scrutinize most media, and I try to show some integrity, even when I happen to be bias. Then again, I also know that if a company makes a shit product, and I’ve supported them in the past, you can bet your life’s savings that I will be tearing that company a new one. I try to be humble, but I also have integrity. Let’s discuss one last aspect of modern journalism that tends to be missing: the ability to write. I’ve always believed writing is more a gift, than something that can be taught. Spewing beautiful allegories, and prose that comes out of your fingers that almost feels divine is not something you can just learn overnight, it’s something that comes from thousands of hours of discipline. The new media allow for this to be taken into consideration, where word count would limit free-flowing prose before. Granted, I don’t want ten lines of alliteration whenever a terrorist is captured, or a rhyming couplet at the end of analysis of the president’s speech, but there is no doubt there’s a quality of writing not seen before sprouting up in many hard-line news posts. Just look at how many more colloquialisms we have in news articles, and witty double-entendres in editorials than there have been in all of modern American news writing. Everything written almost feels like it was supposed to be posted in a forum for debate, and the fact is: most of the time, it is! Everything written is now under constant scrutiny. You cannot ever write a story, and expect it to just go away into the background the next day. People keep topics and articles alive now with commentary, and you will either have to keep up with it all, putting more detail into a thousand word article than you ever thought possible, or ignore every single comment, criticism, or outright enraged rant that comes your way. The internet has forced the lines that separate the celebrity from the fan to the point where a verified account means your message will most likely reach the individual you’re projecting those feelings toward. For that reason, Twitter is one of the greatest inventions, because it limits your thirty-paragraphs rants, but are short enough that the average person could read a thousand tweets in a day, and feel like it was barely an effort. Even if someone sends you two thousand tweets daily, it takes less than five seconds to read a single tweet (obviously if it has a tinyurl, or a link, that it takes longer to read the full details of that tweet.) 140 characters will become the normal amount for a response, and that give even the most carpal tunnel hands the ability to answer without feeling the pressure of writing a full-open statement. I’ve already written enough to equal at least several hundred tweets, and most likely I’ll have nearly a thousand tweets done before I finish writing this article. Incredible how journalism is now in our hands, and in-truth, it has been for some time now. The likes of independent news sources actually hiring directly from the colleges, taking away students that would go to those jobs in Old Media outlets, and most likely be fired within the same year as their “golden opportunity” first arises, you’ll find that those who go and work at the independent outlets will most likely have longer careers than their Old Media counterparts. Big Print isn’t very happy about this, because they refuse to change, and journalism has truly not changed in source gathering since yellow journalism spread far and wide enough to become what was expected of most newspapers. Pulitzer was the start of the corruption, the cancer of which all newspapers lost the integrity to tell even the most truth-bearing news stories, and the digital media is now the cure for that cancer. You don’t have to agree with me on this, and I’m sure this will expunge many critics to say I don’t know jack about news media, that I don’t even spread newsworthy posts. That may be true, but I also have been through the depths of most journalism classes, I have done years of research into Mass Media, Digital Media, even the history of our corrupt news organizations. Trust me, I know news, and I know that the people are barely getting the facts on a daily basis, let-alone the respect and integrity they deserve. 9/11 was a tragedy, it was the worst attack on American soil since 1993’s bombing, and dwarfs even the attacks of Pearl Harbor, but the only good thing that came out of it (and I say this very, very lightly, because I know the wounds of this travesty have not healed. I mean no disrespect to the victims and families) is that we now are actively searching out the truth more often, and we criticize harsher than ever before. Yes! We are making your cushy jobs harder, “journalists”, because we’re no longer taking the fodder you spew at us on a constant basis as truth. I despise the Huffington post, and Slate, but even they are now better examples of news than CNN, FOX, MSNBC and CNBC combined. Even Breitbart.tv, VICE, and Taki-Mag are far more entertaining than the dribble that comes out of Charlie Rose’s mouth. It has become so bad, I search for news on Ariang and CCTV. BBC News is the last great frontier of Western news, and don’t get me started on Al-Jazeera. So what better alternatives are out there? At least we can directly affect a load of B.S. online by calling foul on these internet sources, Journalism is dead, let’s ring in the people, who are showing that news isn’t just a job for the elite, it isn’t only the blue blooded calorie corporations that can write down facts, and it proves that we still are the most powerful check on the powers that be, as they strive to steal more of our rights, our money, and our dignity. I am Malacast Agent, I am a journalist, an outlier that has no axe to grind, no political affiliate, and I know my main job is to inform, while entertaining. I know my opinion is my bond, and my poise on the digital media is what keeps you returning to read this site. I am as much a journalist as anyone with an opinion, and perhaps more because that opinion isn’t bought and sold by anyone. Maybe I’ll be a sellout one day, we eventually all will, but at least I have my dignity today…and not a penny to show for it. Journalism isn’t about the money, it was always about the truth, but today, hopefully, it will come down to corruption on all accounts being ousted, and we will finally get the truth, but change takes forever, no matter the entity. Thank you for reading the Malacast Editorial, you can follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mcasteditorial, or you can send me a message: @mcasteditorial. You can send me an E-mail: mcasteditorial@yahoo.com, or FB me: Malacast Agentt (with two Ts, although I’m rarely ever on. As always, thank you for the constant support, to my domestic and international readers. I’m forever thankful for everyone that comes back weekly to read me, and I hope you’re enjoying the blog. I don’t get much feedback, so that tends to make me think I’m either doing a great job, or barely worth your time, but I’ll try to remain optimistic. Have a great week everyone, please come back every Monday for my Monday Blogs post, and don’t forget to follow Monday Blogs on Twitter as well for the most up-to-date blogs, posted every single Monday!