Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Media Evolution

The role of the Journalist is being reshaped daily, due to modern technology. As discussed in class, everyone serves as a journalist in a sense, having the capability to contribute online content without any sort of gate keeping.

According to the article written by Michael Schudson and Susan E. Tifft, “Journalists have often claimed to serve timeless longings, to be the storytellers of the world, the bards and troubadours of everyday life for everyday people.” In today’s society this is still implemented to an extent. It does seem that journalists are striving to be storytellers; they are storytellers of the world, in that they tell the stories of what is happening around the world, i.e. the news.

Though journalists may long to tell the “stories of the world” in today’s evolving whirl wind of media, it seems that this ability is slowly dwindling. The media have to function as a business while concurrently functioning to serve the public by supplying the information they need and want. This is where a complicated blur comes into effect. How can quality remain, if the media are allowing things such as pseudo-events to flood the pages?

Of course pseudo-events are important to the business aspect of the media. Pseudo-events often keep people happy, more than truly informing people of news. As said in the article From News Gathering to News Making: A Flood of Pseudo-Events by Daniel Boorstin “ ‘Pseudo’ comes from the Greek word meaning false,” this idea of falseness can be applied to the majority of pseudo-events which we see a rise in, in the media today. How often do you read about events that are upcoming? As pointed out by Boorstin, “what does it mean?” will often be the question when speaking about pseudo-events, where as with something more concrete the instinctive question is “What happened?”

The media as a business has encountered a whole new animal with the evolution of journalism today. It is known that online journalism is not a very solid means of profit for the media nor is it a necessarily reliable source for the consumer. How is the media to find a way to continue to work as the media, if online is not raking in enough money? If there was a “right” answer and I knew it, I am sure I would be a very wealthy girl right now.

For the time being, it is frustrating to think about all the community journalists there is out on the world wide web contributing free content without any sort of gate keeping. Though the content created by these free journalists will more than likely not be on par with trained journalists, there is also a lack of editor in the mix. The idea of the lacking editor in this type of scenario seems to be what is keeping the new and old journalists hope hanging on. In reality it seems there is no option but to charge to view credible sites, which would require all media communicating and agreeing on doing so. This seems like a pretty far-fetched idea in reality because all it takes is one person to say they will do it for free and the rest are in the hole.

So we have no real conclusion as to where we will be taken as journalists in the years to come or how it will function as a business in years to come. Looking at years past its not like there is much hindsight, which can be gained and implemented in the future.

So for now… good luck.

1 comment:

  1. This internet thing has me (and every other journalist) so stressed out!!! Does the internet mean an end to all other types of journalistic media? Why would advertisers want to advertise during a newscast with the invention of Tivo, where viewers can fast forward through ads? Why would they want to spend money advertising in news papers when everyone is getting news offline?

    I guess only time will tell.

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