By Timilehin Abdulsalam
Not all media outlets practise journalism. I was reading a story posted online by a news outlet I would not like to mention. After reading that story, I saw another news outlet post the same story but with a different storyline.
Now the question is, which of them is telling the truth? There is a significant difference between journalism and opinion writing or sharing a post just to seek attention. Journalism means storytelling with a purpose. The purpose is to educate, inform and entertain people to allow them to make their own decisions. Journalism focuses on a story that can affect people’s lives or stories that have special importance attached to them.
For instance, I’ll bring two instances and tell which one is journalism.
The first one is a story about a man buying a regular wristwatch. The second one is about a man buying one of the very expensive wristwatches and only two of its kind exist in the world.
Due to its rarity and distinctiveness, the second of the two events is what we can refer to as journalism.
Before reporting news, journalists take a few things into account.
These elements include, among others, prominence, conflict and strangeness. Do we consider the comments to be journalism when a piece of journalism is posted and readers begin to interact with it? Some of the comments may be helpful or may offer further details about the events. The comments are not journalism because they have not been vetted and may or may not be factual. So, the answer is no.
It is not all media outlets that practise journalism because everyone posts something and discusses various topics.
A media outlet must be dedicated to informing and educating the public, and the material must have been independently verified before it can be called journalism. Journalism does not consist of a simple article written by an ordinary person to disparage another or to cause controversy. Nowadays, there are organizations or people who call themselves journalists but do nothing but incite violence and cover irrelevant stories that cannot be considered journalism.
These people can neither be considered journalists nor their pieces be considered journalism; thus, we have to state the difference clearly.
In conclusion, journalism focuses on telling stories that influence an individual’s life, not stories that affect him; it tells stories about an unusual event, not stories about obvious happenings; except it has something important attached to it.
As is widely known, “If a man bites a dog, it is news but if a dog bites a man, it is not news.”
About the Author
Timilehin Abdulsalam is a graduate of CIAPS Media and Communication.
