Monday, September 11, 2006

Not quite Sex and the City

This could be the closest thing to a gossip column I’ll ever write.

I plan on talking about the people I work with and work for. I plan on giving you my opinion on the decisions my peers make. And I plan on divulging the details of any scandal, if it would serve the public interest to do so.

But I’m not talking about the who’s-sleeping-with-who kind of gossip. I'm talking about putting in my two cents about what’s going on in the journalism world.

We in the media generally walk a fine line between cutthroat competition and hardcore respect when it comes to other media outlets, and thus I consider journalists at other newspapers to be as much my peers as my competitors. There’s nothing I’d like more than for The Daily Collegian to beat the New York Times on a big story. But I’d still be back the next day begging for a job and worshipping at the altar of West 43rd Street.

If one thing’s for sure in the journalism world, it’s that we’re all kind of working toward the same goal.

Some of us just do it better than others.

One of my journalism classes today reminded me of one of the original reasons I wanted to create this blog.

My professor shared a recent survey with the class that reported only about 8 percent of the public had a "great amount" of confidence in the media.

Meanwhile, more than 40 percent of respondents reported having "hardly any" confidence in the media at all.

That scares me, so this is my effort to work on that. Here’s where I’ll give you my expert opinion on things like new technologies, media scandals and reader confidence in the media.

I believe the more you understand what we do, the more confidence you’ll have in the way we do it.

Stay tuned.