Final Answer Part Dos

2. “No one hears the phrase journalistic excellence and immediately thinks: What the hell does that mean?” (Scheuer 41). However, over the past four months our Communications 239 class has laboriously and meticulously picked apart and challenged the views of every journalistic question presented to us including the question, what is journalistic excellence? I once thought journalistic excellence was simply presenting a well written, meaningful story with integrity. Now I know it is much more complicated than it seems. Journalistic excellence raises all kinds of questions like, “What is news? What is truth? What is objectivity? Etc. Etc.” Rather than delving into the philosophical aspects of those questions at this time, I will try my best to stick to the question at hand. Even after becoming completely overwhelmed with all the complexities and intricacies of what we discussed in class, and wanting to quit before I even began, I realized at the end of the day, it all boils down to the same thing. Journalistic excellence is a process of constant learning, the open-mindedness to new ideas and criticisms, and recognizing there is always room for improvement. “Excellence in journalism can be neither wholly relative nor absolute. It is an envelope that we must continually push” (Scheuer 37).
Some important elements in journalistic excellence include searching for truth, verifying the who, what, when, where, why for an accurate portrayal, selecting what information is relative and pertinent, connecting all the facts and details in the context to provide the readers substance and meaning, and examining methods used to make sure it is as objective as possible (Scheuer 65-67).
Part of journalistic excellence is maintaining independence. Newspaper organizations must maintain independence. Once organizations start accepting bribes and pushing others’ agendas rather than serving the good of the public then they go against everything they are supposed to stand for.
The Montgomery Advertiser did a really good job on providing local and state news to the readers. The reporters covered important debates and court cases to high school football teams. I saw (and personally know from my interview with Sebastian Kitchen) that the reporters try their best to present information as objectively as possible. I personally think they could have done a better job including news happening outside the state of Alabama. They did have one section labeled Nation which lists ten articles under the different headings like Business, Middle East, Politics etc. New York Times has a specific page for each of those topics with more than ten articles that link to other related articles. The Montgomery Advertiser website is almost overly simplistic in its style. I personally think they could clean it up a little to make it more aesthetically pleasing as well as user friendly. De-cluttering, reorganizing, and modernizing the site will help the site achieve more journalistic excellence.