Poor Journalism

I was recently searching the internet looking for something to do when I came across something which shocked me –a website by a guy called Tom Scott who has created a set of Journalism Warning Labels he has created to warn people of what he calls “sloppy journalism and other questionable content”. In his site, he mentions how he has been putting the stickers on copies of free London newspapers and has even made them available for readers to download.

At first I was appalled by this – if I saw one of these stickers on a piece of my work I would be very offended and a little upset. But then, as I thought more about the idea I realised that apart from sending letters to the editor, there is no real way of commenting on newspaper articles as there is online. If you send a letter in to a newspaper they are unlikely to publish it but if you comment on an article on their news website, a person is more likely to see it.

A couple of websites later, I found this article. I am not normally one to read about celebrities’ relationships but when I found this article about the announcement that Muse front man Matt Bellamy and actress Kate Hudson are expecting a baby I couldn’t dismiss it. I don’t wish to brag about my skills – I do not think that I am an amazing writer but if I wrote an article like that one I would give up on any hope I ever had of being a journalist.

Having read the Kate Hudson article a few times in a bid to make sense of it I feel that if writing like this appears in your newspaper Tom Scott’s stickers might not be so offensive after all!