The Internet: Another Medium With Its Gatekeepers

The Internet is unprecedented among means for producing news because it is accessible to nearly anyone. While the digital divide remains a persistent problem, obtaining the means to produce a blog is as simple as purchasing a computer with internet access, making it easily accessible to ordinary people without connections or access to loans to start up a business.

Unfortunately, like many other means for citizens to express themselves, the Internet has the potential to be co-opted, either by the government or by private interests. The idea of giving access to "fast lanes" on the Internet is antithetical to the idea of universal accessibility, as it puts individual bloggers at a disadvantage by having their content processed more slowly. The plan, if enacted, would thus make it even harder for smaller news sites to maintain their online presence and compete with the larger and faster-loading pages, and would serve to exacerbate typical advantages based on money on the Internet.

Making one's content prominent on the Internet is another issue that independent journalists face. This is often accomplished by having other sites, a notable example being the Drudge Report, feature one's work, but to do so, one's work must be prominent enough to become noticed. Search engines, as I mentioned before, operate under various algorithms that people can exploit to make their site appear more relevant to the results than it should be. This process helps people who know enough about working the system more than it helps people with truly original and in-depth reporting, showing that hard work and talent do not necessarily guarantee success.

The Internet, while being accessible to everyone, does not guarantee prominence to every Internet journalist, or even distribute it in a fair way. Although search engines can be optimized and proposals to give greater connection speed to organizations that pay more can be defeated, neither can address people favoring more prominent inferior news sites to less prominent superior sites. The only way to address this is to help inform them about their decisions and help educate them about what makes a good internet news source. While the Internet's structure helps affect how people see their choices, it is up to them to make their decisions as to what sources of information are best and most important for them, and if they support the ones that do it well, good journalism will prosper online.