If a plane crashes in a city and everyone is around to see it, whom do you ask what happened? Whom do you believe?

I struggled with these questions as I read chapter three of Mark Briggs’s 2013 book “journalismNEXT.”

I don’t know that I have answers to these questions, even now that I have finished the reading. I don’t know that I ever will. I don’t know that right answers to these questions exist or that one answer would be right in every situation.

Here are the things that I do know. (Please note that I am a fallible, unfinished, learning journalist.):

-When I first became a student journalist in 1993 (my freshman year of high school), there were journalists and there were sources. Journalists gathered the news from sources and reported it to readers, viewers and listeners. Sources never expressed much interest in becoming journalists, though they may have occasionally penned letters to the editor.

-This is 2013.

I understand the demands of the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure of looming deadlines. I understand the desire to get the story to the public first, or at least in a timely fashion.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if people won’t wake up one day and want long-form journalism produced by people who do nothing but seek information for them. I wonder if the pendulum won’t swing so far in this direction–the direction that says that everyone can be a journalist–that it swings back the other way.

I think that scenario could happen, but I think it is far more likely that passionate journalists will simply one day look around at each other and find an audience. I think journalists will stop trying to reach everyone and simply start writing and reporting for their peers–people who appreciate the work that goes into good journalism.

If journalists did that, they wouldn’t need to worry about the masses.

Obviously, I have trust issues. I am working on them, I assure you. Like I said, I am a learning journalist.

My name is Elizabeth Grisham and I love email.

I subscribe to many newspaper mailing lists, breaking news email bulletins and other journalism-related email newsletters. Right now, I have more than 100,000 messages–many of which fall into this category–in my personal email inbox. (Thank goodness for unlimited storage.)

I don’t have a smartphone, so I check my email only occasionally throughout the day, and I do so on a computer.

When I am not occupied with email, I am consuming other kinds of media.

For one thing, I still read print newspapers, namely Broadside and The Washington Post. I am a print journalist and I love getting newsprint on my fingers.

I started using Twitter only last Fall (2012), but now I use it daily. I use it much like an RSS reader. I subscribe to the Twitter feeds of journalists and stay up-to-date on what they are saying, learning and doing. Here is a link to my Twitter page. Follow me if you like. Please know, though, that I’m boring. I almost never tweet. Like I said, I use Twitter more to listen in on the journalism industry conversation.

RSS feeds and news websites themselves make up the next tier of my diet. I actually find Twitter easier to use at this point, so I am having a hard time getting back into my love affair with RSS (which I first began using in 2003 or 2004).

Blogs make up the top (and smallest) tier of my pyramid. I read food blogs and baby blogs. I do not really read journalism blogs, though. I suppose I am very old-fashioned that way. I think journalists ought to be conduits for their stories, not first-person voices in them. I think I may have to work on that, though.

Perhaps, then, I will have to make some changes to my media pyramid in the near future.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check my email.

Natasha John and Afshan Hassan are members of a South Asian sorority–Kappa Phi Gamma–at George Mason University, and they are calling all Mason women to join them.

To help them achieve that goal, Hassan and John are operating a kiosk in the Johnson Center. They have decked it out in green and black and gold and topped it with informational materials.

“Right now, we only have five members on our campus,” said Hassan, a Mason graduate student studying education.

Nationally, though, the organization has 700-900 members, she said.

“We’re not very big. That gives us the ability to connect with one another,” she said.

John said Mason women should know that they don’t have to be of South Asian descent to be a part of the organization.

“We kind of look for all kinds of girls who are interested in learning about our culture,” she said.

Those women who are interested in joining should “Come out to our Rush Week events,” John said.

“After that we hold interviews,” she said.

Women who enter the group will gain self-confidence and leadership skills, John said.

Freshman biology major Raiga Somjee stopped by the kiosk and looked over the materials on display.

“I don’t know much about it,” she said.

John and Hassan hope similar students will seek them out to learn more.