In the past few days, I’ve seen some great journalism. Deadbeatdolehead has documented an “error” by House of Ireland, who advertised for a Jobbridge intern. As DBDH points out, the job description differed when the same position was listed on a jobs website.
As people protested to House of Ireland about what they had done, they were eventually forced to shut down commenting on their Facebook page.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like this happen. And it’s not the first time I’ve seen such a story go unreported in “mainstream media”.
I’m not sure why these stories get ignored., Maybe there’s a snobbishness among journalists, and they disdain the web. Maybe it’s a Not Invented Here attitude. Maybe an editor got cold feet about potential libel letters. Maybe no journalist noticed.
On a good day, this blog will get pageviews in the hundreds. I suspect most blogs in Ireland are doing the same. A few will number in the thousands. The networks are loose, casual, and small. I suspect that makes them easy to ignore when they break stories.
So if Twitter records a falling tree, but mainstream media ignores the story, does it make a noise?
Thanks for that Gerard! Not sure I’d call my blog post ‘great journalism’ but I appreciate the point you’re making. In context – I have about 150+ followers on Twitter and only a couple of posts on my blog.
Most days, there would be few (if any) views on my blog – on rare occasions when I post something (vaguely) interesting, that gets picked up on Twitter – the page count races up.
For example, a tweet linking my blog post from your good self or Constantin Gurdgiev can mean hundreds of views on my blog – the biggest reaction I got yesterday was when I sent the link to broadsheet.ie and they posted a link to my blog on their site – the view count subsequently ran to over 800 views.
Other than that, no-one contacted me regarding the story (despite emailing it to the journal) and in general, it is quite difficult to guage how much online momentum is required for a story to make it into the main stream media.
Sometimes, I wonder about stories that race around Twitter garnering hundreds of tweets – but until they make a breakthrough onto a news site (like broadsheet, the journal etc) or even liveline … they never break out of the Twitter-sphere.
The question arises: Does the main stream media produce news stories the public is interested in…or does the main stream media decide what news stories will interest the public…