"Googling"-Is the internet destroying credibility for student journalist?

Investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the “Watergate scandal” in the early 1970s with shoe-leather journalism- old fashioned reporting using human resources for information.

Referencing Yale students at the annual American Society of News Editors conference in April, Bob Woodward spoke about how it bothered him that the students disregarded shoe-leather journalism for the simpler route-Googling.

But what could be so wrong with googling information?

In the deadline-mandated profession of journalism, time is indeed money, and any outlet to save time on an assignment is essential. These shortcuts, however, may harm credibility of a story.

Say a student is given an assignment to profile a local reporter, and the due date is two weeks away. One may argue that the best way to produce this story would be to search through the local yellow pages, dial a news station and make an appointment to have a real-life interview with the reporter for the story. Another might argue, why go through the trouble and time of all that (finding the right person to talk to or conducting the actual interview may take at least a week) when one can simply Google this person, read their online bio, and create a profile using quotes via that reporter’s social media website. If the assignment is not clearly stated and a student is pressed for time, the second form of “journalism” is very plausible for the assignment.

However, this press for time and quick  information may compromise the value of content because extensive time and reporting was not  conducted to show the newsworthiness of the story. Blogger Andrew White argues that this issue is prevalent because people trust what they read online.

“…much of the information on the Internet is not trustworthy… every piece of information must suffer from some scale of trustworthiness… Every individual has to personally experience the discovery,” White says.

  http://ansonalex.com/technology/4-infographics-about-online-trends-internet-usage-and-social-media/

Shoe-leather journalism was held in high regard because of the time and energy put into the story. For months Woodward and Bernstein worked, made numerous phone calls and conducted numerous interviews because of the passion they had for a story that they felt the general public should be informed about. In the early 70s, this type of journalism was the life for them. Could today’s dependency on a quick Google search be the possible collapse of a student journalists’ passion for the core of a story? If this is the case, perhaps a student journalist should observe why he/she desired a career as a journalist in the first place.

Journalist Charity Sapphire believes that a dependency on the internet for information not only drains credibility of a story but drains the person reporting the information as well.

“The internet may be a place where things are gathered and documented, but if you always experience life through another’s eyes, you WILL feel cold and bored and you WILL have missed out on your own path and your own talents,” she says, “News is ever important and if we don’t do something to remind people where news comes from (I.E. The REAL world) then people will continue to grow detached and disbelieving.”