What do you miss from the old internet?

_number8_@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 260 points –

i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.

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God yes.

I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. We’re also occasionally asked to put up SEO commercial text for our advertising partners. And good god, they look like they were written by a lobotomised monkey on a malfunctioning typewriter.

Are you not called journalists anymore? Or are you just lying?

One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.

In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.

From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.

Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.

I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…

Ah yes! The elusive columnist! None of those ever attended J school or are held to journalism standards. They can definitely print whatever the fuck they want without any sort of fact finding or double checking.