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| Censored News photos spanning 13 years, from the southern border to Oneida, Wisconsin Boarding School Summit to Bolivia. Photos by Brenda Norrell. |
By Brenda Norrell
Censored News
What will be the future of journalism. What will young journalists find as solutions to an industry that has crashed and burned, with some excellence remaining in the ashes.
Advertising, grants and non-profit dollars sway news content and helped the bankrupt print industry die.
This is why Censored News has none of these. There are no advertising or grants. Censored News is not part of any non-profit. This was the only way to keep the focus clear.
But our good-hearted writers and photographers don't get paid.
It takes a great deal of money for journalists to travel. There are car expenses, flights, food, lodging and equipment.
The ugly remedy to this problem has been for online news publications to steal the hard work of those who sacrifice and are present, covering the news and often risking their lives.
Plagiarism, rewriting the work of others, and then deceiving readers about it, is not the answer for authentic journalism.
"Everybody is doing it," a well-known publisher told me recently.
No, not everyone is doing it, plagiarizing, deceiving and profiteering from others work without permission.
Censored News celebrates those who honor the work of journalism and love truth and justice.
We celebrate the integrity and honesty of those who do their own work, far from the maddening crowd of the complacent and the conventional.
They keep authentic journalism alive.
About the author
Brenda Norrell has been a journalist in Indian country for 37 years, beginning at Navajo Times during the 18 years she lived on the Navajo Nation. She was a stringer for AP, USA Today and others. After serving as a longtime staff reporter for Indian Country Today, she was censored and terminated in 2006. After creating Censored News in 2006, she traveled with the Zapatistas, joined Bolivian President Evo Morales in his mountain homeland and reported from the west, the border, and from across America on the Longest Walk northern route in 2008. Censored News is now a collective, with 19 million page views spanning 13 years.
