Journalistic Authority Legitimating News in the Digital Era by Matt Carlson

I am a journalist and I found extremely interesting Journalistic Authority Legitimating News in the Digital Era by Matt Carlson published by Columbia University Press.

Divided in seven chapters, the book analyzes the profession of the journalist, his/her authority and how our profession changed with the times and decades.
But...First of all: who is a journalist?

Someone who, although pretty acculturate doesn't work as it happens in other professions because he  learns something "cryptic" and unknown to all the other ones. (See at the voice: doctor, or engineer and so on.)
No: the journalist builds slowly his credibility and his own authority and he/she learns on the road all the rest. I can tell you that, being a freelancer.

The authority is given by the profession and ethic of the man and woman reporting events.
The author asks if it's possible objectivity and what it means.

Three colleagues to my point of view could be for example in the same place where an event is creating a news,  let's see... it could be a fire, for staying in the news of the horrendous Californian fires; right. Probably they will report a similar although at the same time a complete different story of the events, maintaining the objectivity of the facts.

What a journalist does in fact, is to add his/her soul, living as a mission this work, looking through the lenses of his/her own experiences, facts that he is currently living and that he reports. This work is psychological, it's emphatic.
We are not robots.

In biggest newsmagazines or realities as the author will see, newsmagazines and magazines will be influenced by political; a flag supported by the entire newsroom.
The Pulitzer Prize, remarks the author is a necessity because it's an important engine for all American newsrooms for staying in the news. See at the voice Boston Globe and the case of the Catholic pedophile priests.

Maybe a problem could be that, at certain levels, journalists will speak mainly with the elite of power and this disconnection with the real reality  could create some misunderstanding with the base, uncovered and left alone; no one will report their real problems are and this one is negative.

The author tells the positive important impact that photography has had at the beginning of XX century, because it started to add something more to the news: a face of a criminal or of a person involved in some interesting fact, the place of  a murder, maybe also the corpse of a victim assassinated. Later, beautiful magazines as Life.

Photography added color to the piece it's the case of saying.

The internet created more work to journalists, because as also experienced journalists accredited at the White House with President Obama, who started the tradition of using Twitter and Facebook for keeping update of the latest news the world, a press conference is integrative of what said by the President and for trying to understand what it will happen later; they know in part the thoughts of the President and they can develop his thoughts in various directions.

The net has been a real revolution under many aspects. As the author adds, in the past a piece could be saved, cut, put aside, but not "shared" in the rest of the world or the internal American territory by the use of social medias as Facebook, Twitter.
It says a lot in terms of audiences.

A characteristic of a good reporter is clarity. This fact is more than real; our audience is big, and sometimes we are more loved and appreciated by simple people, maybe with less education but more interested to read with passion a newsmagazine or a magazine because they know how precious was to learn how to write and read once, when there was poverty, than not from an audience that it is implied to be there, waiting for us.
So, writing with clarity for everyone is indispensable and also less stressing for our readers.

The book contains much more, and you should absolutely read it if you are in the media or if you are a journalist or someone curious of our profession. We are good devils, after all :-)

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori