Five Reasons Why Zombies Would Make Great Journalists
I’m not a journalist.. yet. I did my stint on the high school newspaper and that was the end of it. I admire good journalists, and I adore good journalism – but it seems, as the Internet increases in popularity and usefulness, quality journalism becomes more difficult to find.
We have reporters – for pay, for free, or for fun – millions of them, and some are excellent sources of information. The rest are polluting the pool with their incoherent, ill-informed drivel, and that lack of ability is lowering the bar for every blogger, writer, and wanna-be journalist coming onto the scene.
Today I arrived at the perfect solution. The industry is dying, so why not re-animate it with the undead? Here’s five reasons why zombies would make better journalists than our current roster.
1 – A zombie isn’t afraid of the truth. He’s not afraid of losing his job, his house, his wife, or his freedom for exposing the corruption of the world in which he lives. Fleshy journalists are all too easily swayed by their primal need for things like “shelter” and “companionship”; a zombie journalist would have no such compunctions.
2 – You can’t bribe a zombie. Modern journalism is tainted by greed. We don’t get news anymore, we gets news as approved, paid for, and sanitized by a number of large corporations and for-profit interests. Newspapers, blogs, and individual reporters have their cash flows altered depending on what they print and what they keep quiet. Zombies don’t need your money – they only want your brains. Trying to hand a zombie journalist wads of cash in exchange for favorable press would only result in you being eaten.
3 – Zombies demand brains. The best journalism comes from finding intelligent, credible people and coaxing them into telling their side of the story. We still get these kinds of stories, once in a while, but in most cases the “inspiring portrait of humanity’s virtues” story has been replaced by the “adorable small animal being adorable” story, as relayed through the fantasy land of the Internet. Intelligence used to be the name of the game in journalism – you had to be smart, pick smart stories, find smart people to support your story, and write for a smart audience. Journalism has become stupid, but zombies will never stop wanting their readers’ brains.
4 – Zombies don’t give up. Any writer knows that stories require effort, investigation, long hours of chasing down the facts or just getting the facts down on paper. Modern writers are lazy. They’d rather construct “news” out of Google and Wikipedia snippets than invest the thought, time, and effort into getting the facts. But zombies are constantly on the go. The only time they’re sitting still is when they’re looking for something to chase, and once they spot it, they don’t stop. No zombie journalist is going to be deterred by a security guard, a police officer, or a locked door. They’re going to get to the beating heart of that story, and they’ll go through you to get it, if they must.
5 – Zombies understand how to “go viral”. In the fast-paced world of Internet journalism, getting your message out to the multitudes must happen fast and in as many places as possible, all at once. Writers have to launch a multi-pronged attack on Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the blogosphere in order to be just a blip on the worldwide news map. For a mere mortal, this can be exhausting and very confusing. For a zombie, it’s second nature. A zombie journalist would innately know how to spread the word around the world within 24 hours.. 28 days at the most.
I’m not saying all modern journalists are bad people, or that zombies should take over the field of journalism. There are still some fine journalists, reliable newspapers, and trustworthy reporters out there.
There’s also the Daily Mail, Yahoo! News, and MSN. There are wealthy, unscrupulous politicians and corporate entities who want to manipulate your view of them. There are ugly, secret things going on behind the scenes which may very well have a direct impact on our quality of life.
And Hunter Thompson can’t help us sort them out anymore. The whole purpose of journalism – hell, the whole purpose of writing – is to tell the stories that need telling. So bring forth the zombies, I say, and let’s arm them with micro-cassette recorders and mini notebooks, give them their own news network (ZNN?), and get back to seeing humanity the way it truly is. Not through a lens of Prozac and cat videos, but from the viewpoint of someone who has seen it all, the best and the worst of mankind, and who remains to tell the tale.
