Just plain, old-fashioned good writing

It's been recently brought up in one of my journalism classes that journalism today is "crap."

Whoa, back up, someone in a journalism class said journalism is "crap"?

Yes, it was my professor to be exact.

Now, let me clarify. He was not necessarily saying all journalism is bad, he was just making a statement to clarify that people going into the journalism profession need to making their writing more "reader-centered."

OK, so what does "reader-centered" mean?

In short, making journalism more reader-centered would be getting rid of all the clichés, keeping all the same style rules but making the stories new for the reader. I mean, how many times have we all been reading a newspaper in say, October, and come across a story about pumpkin carving? It's tired. Yes, people like to carve pumpkins in the fall months, but let's mix it up -- take it to the next level. We don't need to necessarily avoid those kinds of stories, especially since that's what a lot of people like to read about, and the readers are why we're all here in the first place.

There seems to be another problem plaguing journalism today -- the pseudo smart guy. We've all read stories written by these people. They contain hundreds of unnecessary descriptions and details and try to use "big words" to make us believe that they know what they are talking about. A journalist whose name escapes me at the moment said it best when he said that we are always trying to "muddy the waters hoping that someone will mistake us for deep." This isn't what readers want -- to be reading in circles until they get to the end and have no idea what they just read. No, we need to be confident in what we say and how we say it, and trust that people will care enough about what we're saying to read about it.

What we need is to get back to the basics, back to just plain old good writing.