Yellow journalism thriving on Internet

Thanks to the Internet, a fad from the past has re-emerged to haunt the journalism world: yellow journalism. Yellow journalism occurs when news and media become sensationalized and focus more on attention-grabbing headlines than legitimate reporting. Unfortunately, some of the media being published today by amateur journalists and bloggers leans towards this tendency.

Nowadays, everyone can post whatever they like on their Twitter accounts, post videos on YouTube and create their own political blogs. Never has communication and news been so easy to access for the general public. The problem lies with the rules of journalism, and how they are misapplied by the masses.

It is hard for news to not become sensationalized when amateurs can take video of an incident and post it on YouTube with their own commentary. When the public watches these videos of important events, they may take into account the opinion of the poster.

According to mediacultures.net, as of March 2008, 78.3 million videos were estimated to be on YouTube and 2.6 percent of those videos fall into the "news" category. They estimated that 80.3 percent of the total videos were made by amateurs. That means that a little more than 150,000 amateur news videos were published on YouTube as of 2008. Two years later, we can only imagine how that number has increased.

One problem of independently produced news comes with the lack of fact-checking that goes into the process. With the individually-created YouTube videos and political blogs comes little financial investment, which is exactly what makes them so popular to create. With only the individual credibility to lend their articles and no money for fact-checking, there comes a mass of biased and inaccurate information on the web.

It's analogous to Wikipedia. Your professors won't let you use it as a source, but it might be a good place to start while researching a topic. You have to doubt and analyze everything that you read, and check other sources before claiming anything to be true.

Progress comes with groups like groundreport.com, which according to their Web site, "is a citizen news portal that enables anyone to instantly publish articles, photos and video to a global audience." They also send all reports to a team of editors before they publish them, to ensure correctness and professionalism.

What we need are more outlets like this in which people can report news as it happens right in front of them, but in an edited manner. While most people's intentions may be pure, their ability as journalists may be lacking. News stations and journalists cannot always be on the scene as news occurs and sometimes amateur footage helps. We need to make sure, however, that this footage finds its way through an appropriate outlet before it is published.

We have entered an age in which traditional print journalism is falling by the wayside. What cannot fall to the curb is professionalism in journalism. We must still hold ourselves to an unbiased and informative view of what happened as best we can. Without this, we will be lost in a sea of propaganda and sensationalist media.