Five successful UW-Madison alumni journalists told students Wednesday that despite popular belief, journalism will not die out any time soon.
ABC News national correspondent Chris Bury said although the medium for presentation of news is changing, the public will always need journalists to remain informed.
The panelists said journalism has changed immensely since the beginning of their careers. At the beginning of their careers, people got most of their news from television, whereas people today use new technological devices such as the iPad to gather information.
CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg said social networking sites such as Twitter make it easy for anyone to post unreliable news on the Internet.
""We live in a world of citizen journalists."" Greenberg said, ""The question now is not if you have the technology and you know how to use it. The question is who is feeding it to you.""
The panel also discussed the tendency for certain television stations to favor particular political parties.
An audience member asked Fox News senior executive producer David Tabacoff to comment on a video clip aired on Fox News' ""The O'Reilly Factor,"" a conservative program.
The clip, which aired during the Capitol protests about the budget repair bill, showed pro-union protesters demonstrating violently. However, the protesters shown in the clip were in a warm environment with palm trees, not Wisconsin.
Tabacoff defended his station, saying the clip was not misleading because no one on the show said the protesters shown were the protesters in Wisconsin.
Senior Fellow at Poynter Institute for Media Studies Jill Geisler said she thinks people now care more about how news will affect them personally rather than how it will affect the world as a whole.
""The change that I sense is a move of a frame from ‘what does it mean to me' to ‘what does it mean to society,'"" Geisler said.
