Week Six: Nicole Cohen

Are organizations really "upgrading" when adopting a new technology or program? I am just shocked by how money-driven our world is. Obviously I’m not an economist and someone might read my post and say “Christina, really? Obviously money is what drives people to work, or, come on… organizations have always wanted to be profitable” but that’s okay. I read Cohen’s article and cannot seem to grasp how you take the journalist away from journalism. Sure, algorithms may be able to develop headlines that sound legit, but journalism is supposed to be society’s connection with current, important affairs, human writers need to connect society with this information in a personable format. It just seems that journalism is one of MANY other professions whose worth is being degraded because of technology. We have talked about this in my LIS courses, considering the reasons why organizations are choosing to hire non-ALA accredited workers to fill the role of a librarian. Collection management—a classic librarian responsibility—has been downgraded by the use of online databases that monitor a library’s collection and automatically suggest and order books. This causes employers to wonder WHY they are paying a professional librarian’s salary when they can hire lower-paid workers and depend on these online databases. With this said, there is no doubt that technology has been beneficial to journalists (as Cohen suggests, journalists now have access to limitless material online that they can pull from to develop a story) but these developments in technology are jeopardizing the profession. At what point to we take a stand and defend these jobs? When does quality of work begin matter more than profits or efficiency? How do we reinstate value to the journalism profession? Is it already too late? Technology has brought about SO many questions and there is just so much uncertainty around the debate, that protecting these jobs from technology cannot happen.

Source: Cohen, Nicole S. (2015). From pink slips to pink slime: Transforming media labour in a digital age. The Communication Review 18(2): 98-122.