On Wednesday of last week, The Gauntlet invited journalist Dennis Maley (father of The Gauntlet’s design editor Sully Maley) to discuss the state of journalism in today’s world.

Mr. Maley is an acclaimed journalist for The Bradenton Times, a popular local newspaper in Bradenton. Along with being a senior editor for TBT, Mr. Maley is also a published author and a former captain in the United States Army.

Mr. Maley’s talk touched on many topics, including the commercialization of journalism, journalism past and present, bias in journalism, and his personal experience in the trade.  One popular anecdote involved his describing a comical interview with legendary NFL star, Jim Brown.

A big topic Mr. Maley talked about was bias in journalism and how to write articles objectively. He explained that a trend in news readership is for readers to find themselves is a bubble of bias, taking in only news that agrees with their point of view, which can lead to ignorance or extremism.

Another thoughtful topic he talked about was technology and the changes new technology has caused in our economy. This is a hot topic in the journalism world due to the drastic change in journalism with news being super easy to access online. Nowadays anyone can post something news worthy online which draws attention away from the bigger sources like New York Times. The issue of news being shifted to technology ruins the actual jobs of professional journalists by taking the quality out of their work and decreasing their pay.