What the Net has done to journalism
Many journalism educators will find this Washington Post article very useful as a condensed version of all that has happened to our field in recent years. At the end, Patricia Sullivan writes:
There’s no question that the Internet has changed the news industry in the past decade. Old media has learned that simply shoveling content from one medium to the Web doesn’t work, any more than reading a newspaper into a TV camera capitalizes on the strength of that medium.Technology has driven behavioral changes, as reporters, producers, photographers and editors learn that interactivity in the form of e-mail, blogs, polls, hyperlinks, videologs, podcasts and news delivered via cell phones can open their work up to a newer and bigger audience, for better or worse….
What worries professional journalists above all else is whether what replaces the newsroom of today will support the journalism of tomorrow.
“The question no longer is whether the newspaper will endure, but whether the kind of news that is essential to a functioning democracy will survive,” says Melvin Mencher in the current Nieman Reports …
That news, the kind that reveals secret prisons in Eastern Europe or government eavesdropping on telephone calls or the danger of badly built levees in a hurricane-prone area, is expensive, takes time and causes trouble. The audience for it is sometimes small and it’s not easy to sell to advertisers. Right now, almost no online news sites invest in original, in-depth and scrupulously edited news reporting.
Source: “As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed,” June 19, 2006
When so many of our textbooks go out of date six months after publication, it’s great to get a summary like this to update our students.
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