For the Love of the Job

In my past post I've spent all my time talking about why I want to be a journalist and why I think the media is important but haven't once said what journalism actually is. While this answer seems simple, like most things, it is not.  Journalism is not just the newspaper or the news. As I was searching for words to describe it I found an interesting site called savethemedia.com. Deep in its archive(http://tinyurl.com/ddao3a), I found Gina Chen, a newspaper journalist for 20 years. She described journalism as, "Telling true stories, communicating information that will help people make sense of their world, and getting the story behind the story." I think this is the perfect description of what all journalists truly want to do.
One of the key things that hit me while learning about this was how important world views are to journalist. Having an open mind about the world is extremely important as a journalist. Where you are from, so for me Happy Valley, also influences how and what type of things you will report. As a member of Happy Valley, I may tend to report things from a different point of view than others. In this article (http://tinyurl.com/ylcadwz) the author calls for a more unbiased press. She calls the media biased because of our world views. I disagree with her. Like Gina Chen said in her article, we are to help people make sense of their world. As strange as it sounds, we all are living in different worlds. Everything we do, see, taste, hear, smell, or communicate will change the way we view the world, so in a sense we can never be unbiased.
As journalists this means we have to make certain we have pre-set beliefs, attitudes, and values. We need to make sure we report the truth in the best, most fair, and accurate way we know how. Then, maybe one day, we will be lucky enough to report on a story like this: