On the record?
Off the record?
Journalists exercise discretion as part of the business, but most put together stories for broadly distributed publication. The investigative types routinely pull together stories their subjects may not wish to see read anywhere.
That’s “Watergate”.
Ours is a different era.
We have the global “war on terror”; we have our wondrous Internet that wraps the world in new communications, intimate and public, trivial and history changing, friendly for the most part, on occasion discomforting; and we have information-oriented entrepreneurs of every imaginable type, all of whom self-assign and pursue eclectic projects, and they do what they would do if they were free because, in fact, and whatever the combination of funding, motivation, and time available — however they’re put together; however they put it together — they are free and can post thought in innumerable contexts.
In “information space”, you’re representative of both emerged and perhaps emerging types.
Many of my online friends routinely publish in “free press” publications and middle-media blogs sponsored by more established purveyors of news. Relatively few, if any, are picking up money on their virtual print output.
Alas, at similar levels, there are other fauna online: personalities with funny names and little background promoting through their chatyping a familiar and herding or “group-think” yackety-yack — they are the new nemeses, and they are placed everywhere. Be glad you are getting around in real space and spending time with real people . . . .
Doubtless some just “gather it all in” for hours a day.
How has New Media — it’s not so new anymore, actually — changed Everyman’s impression of the greater surrounding world?
In the inbox inside of the first 15 computer-on minutes of the day:
From Phyllis Chesler’s conservative feminist voice for liberation: “Op-Ed: The Truth-Teller’s Gulag: The price is high, but the cost of remaining silent far exceeds the left’s swift punishments for telling the truth.” Arutz Sheva, June 16, 2015.
Without mentioning the Druze, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said the authorities were preparing for a possible influx of Syrian refugees and would prevent a potential massacre at the border.
“The reality in the Golan Heights, where internal fighting is near the border with Israel, is of great concern to us, including the possibility we might have to deal with refugees from Syria arriving at the border,” Eizenkot told a parliamentary committee, his words conveyed by a spokesman.
All day, every day, the world turns up a sea of new information online. Glance at it, parse it, sift it, comment on it, pass it along, recompile it, even act on it, it’s moving, living, morphing before our eyes.
That’s today’s news — a deeply democratized international gabfest, some very high percentage of which involves passing words along, or in the “listening posts” within the minds of citizen journalists chatting beneath the cover of writing– every man and woman a scribe that would wish to be — swallowed, digested, and saved away for a distant later that need never arrive.
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