Today, Everyone Is A Journalist
In the United States, we don't license journalists, for a reason.
The United States is one of the few countries in the world that does not license journalists.
That is for a reason.
The First Amendment guarantees the rights of a Free Press.
That means that everyone and anyone has the right to publish. Everyone.
But up until now, we have not really had a free press. That was because it was so expensive and complicated to publish anything. One could not really start their own TV news network, the costs being astronomical and the FCC restricting broadcasting “licenses” to a very few — three actually, and later four with the addition of Fox, which shows you how much it cost to join the club.
Newspapers were easier to start on your own, but not by much. So the mythology grew that journalism was a very rarified and special profession, open only to the very few and the elite. Their job was to find and report the news, and our job was to read, listen or watch what they had to say.
The result was a very limited and circumscribed view of the world and of world events. Even to this day, people who are old enough will look back on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite with a kind of reverence. Now there was a man, they will tell us, who told us the truth.
This, of course, is utter nonsense.
Journalism, when done properly is not the Word of God from on high. It is not some holy order in perpetual search of ‘the truth.’ Journalism, when done properly, should be a vast cacophony of stories, ideas, and perspectives.
An actual free press should be messy. It is supposed to be.
Up until now, it was The New York Times or CBS or Fox or MSNBC, or any one of a dozen traditional media companies that informed us as to what was going on in the world. The truth is that there was and is a whole lot more going on in the world than one would think, limiting their daily education to those media companies alone. CBS or NBC, or CNN rarely, if ever, report on stories from Latin America, Africa, South Asia, or a thousand other places. This is largely because, for them, it is far too expensive to send a crew, a reporter, a producer, and a support team to South Sudan or Yemen or Malawi or Burma, or a hundred other places that you will never hear from.
But what happens when everyone suddenly has all the equipment they need to create and produce their own news, on their own, without the need to convince CNN or CBS to spend tens of thousands to millions to get to them? It is a new world. And that is the world we are living in today. There are more than 6 billion smartphones worldwide, all capable of shooting, editing, and transmitting a very different kind of news.
And it is not just Malawi or Mali that needs a voice in the world. There are plenty of communities in the United States that also get little coverage — except when there is a violent shooting, for example. They too, deserve a voice. They too deserve to be heard. But how? And where?
What if someone were to create a platform where millions of voices could be heard? What if someone were to create a platform that trained millions and millions of journalists to tell their own stories without the need for a CNN reporter to be flown?
What if someone were to create a platform that would help those nascent journalists not just tell their stories but also get fairly compensated for their work? What if someone started UnPress? Someone did. If you want to join us, don't hesitate to get in touch with us here.