Having been a journalist for many years, I am fascinated by
news. News is one of the most important ways we connect to the world around us.
News is key in helping us making sense of things that, on the surface, don’t
make sense.
And I am a huge fan of journalists.
Journalists are those people, who like firefighters, the police and soldiers, are usually running towards danger while everyone else is running away from it. It’s a journalist's job to be where most people wouldn’t want to be. And it’s their job to be there so they can capture and publish the 'news’.
But what news ‘is’ has changed over the last few years. And it changed because of the Internet. Simply put, the Internet has pretty much decimated the idea of ‘gate keepers’ when it comes to ‘news’. You know, those people fondly known as ‘editors’.
These days, just about anybody (and certainly anybody with Internet access) can write, create, send, post, publish an article and call it news; even if it has nothing to do with facts. This is something I recently experienced regarding a story published about the Seti@Home project; a project I co-conceived a number of years ago.
And in fact if you Google search my name, you’ll see just how much Google ‘indexing’ this story received. And it received all this indexing and conversation on the web, even though the story was a hoax.
It was apparent there were no ‘gate keepers’ to keep this particular story from being published.
Those are not the kind of stories that will be published in
Endangered Earth News.
The purpose of Endangered Earth News is –and will be- to
publish articles that can bring new information, or shed some light on the
issue of endangered species. To do less would be a dis-service to both the idea
of what journalism should be (based on facts) and to the animals (who need the
people trying to help them to be well informed about the issues).
Mostly, the articles in Endangered Earth News will come
from experts and organizations that have an interest in endangered species. At
some point, I plan to write some of the articles myself (once the rust has
started to fall off).
No doubt, many of the articles will find their way
into the Endangered Earth Journal for commentary.
The most important thing is, however, that the articles that
do make it into Endangered Earth News are articles that will serve to inform
people about the plight of endangered animals.
And perhaps what they can do about it.