Opinion and Evidence in Sri Lanka’s Newspapers and Magazines
Posted: 11 May 2012
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
The key to the survival of newspapers and magazines in the new environment will be adherence to the tenets of good journalistic practice. Crowd sourcing through tweets and blogs will provide serious competition to conventional news gathering, but verification of facts, getting all sides of a story, etc., will remain in the hands of journalists. They should, in fact, not fight crowd sourced media, but leverage it, putting more of their effort into enhancing the quality of news and analysis rather than being first or generating the most volume.
In terms of value addition, there will always be a premium on high-quality opinion. When the New York Times experimented with selling online access, they found that the highest demand was for the opinion pieces, not news per se. Routinely, the most read, blogged, emailed sections online are the opinion columns. But these are high-quality, high-cost columns, written by experienced journalists and experts, including a Nobel Laureate economist in the case of the New York Times. They are opinion true, but opinion based on heavy reliance on evidence.
Keywords: newspapers
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