The internet is killing journalism
Or: Ireland wakes up to arguments the rest of the world has been having since 2003.
I do quite a lot of editing for online publication, and reading Conor Brady’s piece in today’s Irish Times on the failings of online news outlets I was struck by his (and his editor’s) failure to substantiate many of the claims he makes in the piece. Indeed, some of the claims he makes are unsubstantiable, though they masquerade as factual assertions thanks to some wily sentence construction. On my lunchbreak today I thought I’d take his piece and treat it as I would a submission to the site I edit for. Just for the craic, like. Having gone through it, I reckon that even if he did make all the changes I suggest, I’m not sure I’d publish it anyway, because, even with the addition of substantiating facts and figures, it’d still be too general to be worthwhile.
By all means, debate the problems within and facing journalism, and the role of the internet in that, but please, please, if you’re doing so, don’t do it as Brady has done below. And if you’re publishing something like that in an online edition that has just recently equipped itself to link out - well, maybe try and do that.
