Introduction
USA is well known for their massive wealth gap. Throughout the whole country, we can see that the US has a very clear line for when you are rich and when you are poor. We have two articles that explain what the wealth gap is, and when you are finished with reading the articles, you can start on the tasks that are made for you. |
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The USA wealth gap
Wealth inequality also known as “the wealth gap in the USA” and it tell and explains the unequal distribution of wealth among the population in the US. USA is probably the western country with the highest inequality among its citizens figures reported that the top 1% owns close to 40% of the national wealth and 10% of the top owns amazing 90% of the national wealth it tells little about the inequality in the country and how the country is in 2 parts the rich and the poor How can this be possible? |
It could maybe be called something like the “free market” as you know it or maybe everybody knows. The Americans have always been good at inventing, and make the industry more efficient than it is, and create new things and stuff that people are interested in, and dreaming about. The Americans have been in the top of inventing in a long time, but what does it mean to have wealth?
It includes the values of homes, expensive cars, personal valuables just in general having wealth is something good. Good wealth is when you have “wealth provides for both short and long term financial security” and in the US this has been under a big debate and discussion, about inequality. Should we let it continue to grow or should we do something about it, before it gets out of hand? Because as people know “the wealthy are getting wealthier” and the poor get poorer it is as the country is broken in half? |
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Outsourced Journalism
By Jakob Kjær Bødker Illustrations and captions by Anton Voigt Rasmussen The Americans have always been known for their ability to invent new solutions, and do things in a cheaper and more efficient way. |
This is perhaps one of the reasons for the growing wealth gap in USA: you can earn a lot of money on these new solutions, but doing things cheaper and more efficient often has negative consequences, both for the quality of your product and for the people who are producing them.
The company Journatic is an example of all this. They have invented a new way of writing articles, but not without costs for both quality and the writers of the articles. |
Journatic is a company that writes small local news articles and sells them to local newspapers. Journatic offers to do some of the boring routine work for the newspapers – their writers write about local high school sports results, the latest local police reports and other things that you does not need to be an experienced journalist to do. So instead of the newspapers using money on local journalists to do this routine work, they pay Journatic for doing it.
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The problem about Journatic is that their writers does not live or work in the local communities that they write their articles about. Usually, local news articles are made by journalists who know the area, but Journatic’s writers live far away and write their articles based on phone call-interviews and internet research. It is much cheaper and one writer can cover more than one area. You could call it outsourced journalism – like when the industry outsources their work to for example China, where the workers are cheaper.
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The problem is that when you do not know the local community and the people you are writing about, and when you only base your stories on internet research, the articles might be wrong. Another problem is that Journatic does not only uses American writers from another part of the country, they also use writers from the Philippines, who are cheaper than the Americans, to write stories about local areas in the USA. These Filipinos are not allowed to write their own name as the writer of the story – they use aliases so that the articles look like being written by Americans.
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Journatic is an example of a new solution. But this solution has costs for the quality – the articles might be incorrect when the writers do not live in the area they cover – and for the journalists, who are underpaid. And at the same time Journatic takes the jobs from the real local journalists who are doing proper local journalism.
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Task 1 (groups of two)
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Task 2 (groups 30 minutes)
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Discuss the Usa wealth-gap and journatics outsourcing (5-10 minutes) |
You can for example discuss some of the following questions
How can such a massive gap between rich and poor happen? What can we do to minimize the difference? What do you think of outsourced journalism and why? Do you know any of these websites like Journatic? Otherwise your teacher can find questions for you to discuss |
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