I look around my newsroom and the Internet and watch and listen and read and I fear greatly for the future of my beloved profession of journalism.

There is so much to remind my colleagues, both mainstream and amateur. So much to warn against.

For instance, the freedom to speak, to write, to report on events of the day is not absolute and must never be absolute.

For the hallmarks of ethical journalism, however it's delivered, are accuracy, responsibility and accountability.

And accuracy, responsibility and accountability do not appear to be high on the list of priorities for the Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces, blogs and fervid “citizen journalists” of this anarchistic new Internet world.

Instead, personal opinion is taking over in both mainstream and Internet journalism.

This means it’s up to the next generation of journalists, whether professional or otherwise, to rescue ethical journalism from chaos and its inevitable consequence — a deeply damaged, perhaps destroyed, democracy.

To do that, we all have to do a lot better in the area that matters most of all — being, and being seen to be, in public service — than we’ve done in recent years.                               

It is demanded of all ethical journalists that, in our communication of information, we put the people’s interests before either our own or those of the powerful.

Our first loyalty is not to our employer, union, nation or cause.

Our first loyalty is and must be to the truth. To serve the people — and the people’s democratic right to honest, accurate and reasonably balanced information.


(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist who's memoir "My Life In The Great Sexual Window" is published on www.Lulu.com and Amazon.)

Mainstream media are in disaster mode.

Advertisers, which once begged for their business, have found a younger, sexier, more skilled and seductive lover — the Internet.

Without advertising (and in the aftermath of the Great Recession) conventional newspapers, magazines, television and radio newsrooms compete to fire journalists — particularly experienced, skilled, more expensive journalists — in a desperate, doomed bid to survive.

The Internet is the uncontrollable wild west provider of instant information and world’s largest functioning anarchy.

It looms over the traditional world of print and broadcast journalism like an electronic angel of death. Its aggregators, Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces and blogs, along with its hungry, growing corps of “citizen journalists”, is likely to destroy ethical professional journalism as we know it.

There will be no ethically-trained, dedicated, professional journalists to question, to seek fairness, context and balance, to investigate, to dig into records, to check and double check, to bear witness, to bring understanding, to speak truth to power and to serve and protect the Free Marketplace of Ideas that is the essence of ethical journalism and the glory of democracy.

Unless we find a solution to all this very soon, our democracies — built over so much resistance and on so much sacrifice over so many centuries — are in grave danger of dying.


(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist who's just publisher her erotic memoir "My Life In The Great Sexual Window.)