Beat Journal

          For our first beat journal I looked into the changes in journalism, and how bloging and the Internet has helped or hindering journalist. I read several blogs from pointer.com and found some good information on how the Internet has affected journalist. There are still some question to how you qualify people who write and what you read on the Internet. After reading there is a couple things that I found that the Internet has helped evolve journalism.

            First, blogging, there are some downfalls to blogging as well, but I have found that they help journalist do many helpful things. They are there at anytime for any reason, journalist can reference them for small stories not worthy of the newspaper or a whole article, but just something they witnessed and thought was interesting. Also live blogs have made it easier for journalist to write stories. Say a journalist have to write a story about the Monday night football game, well he/she can watch the game while live blogging and once the game is over they have a great set of notes to write a detailed story. This way journalist can remember important aspects of the game.

            Next, I read blogs that reference websites. I looked at the websites, but not too in depth. The Internet has given journalist the opportunity to create they’re own websites that can center on many things, including studying and writings they have done. Websites make it easier to navigate through a large amount of information and with the types of programs we have now, they are catchy to the eye as well. 

            I believe that some of the major downfalls to the Internet that I didn’t look too much into but know that they are there and scare me are how personal information is easily distributed and accessed. I feel like privacy is going to become a big problem in the near future. Another problem is reliability, to find that a journalist or a writer is trust worthy there are many steps that you might have to take. People find things on the Internet and automatically think that it is the truth. These things need to be looked at and dealt with.