Online Journalism is less credible compared to Mainstream Media

Now days, there lots of new alternative beside the mainstream media (television, radio and newspapers) that play it role in delivering a news. One of the new alternatives is call online journalism that covers a blog, bulletin board, chat rooms and others. But, online journalism has been criticized as less credible compared to the mainstream media that has been in our community for a long time. There must be a reason why online journalism being categorized as less credible.

The first reason is online journalism did not always provide a true fact or story compared to the mainstream media. Blog is one of the online journalism methods and now days everyone can have a blog because it is easy to create. In their blog they can write anything that the want but it’s difficult to make sure weather what they write is true or not. It can turn into slanders and this can create arguments that can make our country chaos. While, the mainstream media always provide a true story because it usually gets the information from source that can be trusted.

The second reason why online journalism is less credible is because it doesn’t use an ethics in writing the news or story. People who involve in online journalism like blogs can write anything without following the ethics that has been set by the government. Bloggers can say anything that they want because there is no gatekeeper to control what kind of news or story that going to publish and it written in a much less structured way than articles and personal opinions and biases can be exposed. This is different from mainstream media because anything that they want to publish must based on the ethics or they will faced some bad consequence from the government plus the gatekeeper will control and make sure the news that going to publish will not make any harm towards readers / viewers.

Another issue that comes up is that while one of the major advantages to online journalism is the speed with which news can be pumped out to the public the rate of errors increases. When information is flowing through so fast, and stories are being pounded out in a hurry, carelessness and oversight can come into play. It has been said that in the need for speed, steps can be missed, and copy editing can go down the tubes. This leads to distrust and a loss of credibility from the public but this kind of mistakes will not going to happen to the mainstream media.

The last reason is online journalism can bring harm towards the readers / viewers. If we look back at the first until third reason we can say that online journalism can cause harm because the information or fact that being told is not true plus they did not use an appropriate ethics. The mainstream media will not make this kind of mistakes because they must make sure the readers / viewers satisfied with the story being provided to them because in mainstream media readers / viewers are important.

All the following reasons can show that online journalism is less credible compared to the mainstream media. To stay survive, online journalism must make sure it provide fact and information that is true and accurate.