When the newsroom gets old

In his article, ‘Futurama: How the local newsroom of the future might operate’, Marck Glaser makes an educational guess as to how newsrooms will operate in the future.

Glaser says asserts that due to the information age and enhancements in multi media technology the main goal for newsrooms in the future will be to: “Serve the public by collaborating with them and delivering the news they want on the platform of their choice.”

Glaser labels the newsrooms of the future as the “new newsroom” or NNR. Glaser suggests that instead of minimising staff, news organisations will need to hire more staff to ensure that the running of a NNR is as smooth as possible. Glaser explains: “for every person let go who used to run newspaper presses, there would likely be another web developer added. For every person who drove a bulky TV newsvan around, there would be a search engine optimization expert added.”

Although Glaser’s discussion of how NNR may seem a little premature to people who are still adjusting to new media, he raises some valid points. Whether or not his predictions will come true, he has been bold enough to touch on a subject that many people do not want to consider .

Sources: Glaser, Mark (2007). “Futurama: How the local newsroom of the future might operate” found online at NPR’s Mediashift, 1 May 2007.

A view into the imagination

The imagination is a sublimely powerful tool, without it society would not be living in this fascinating information age. It doesn’t just take some highly intelligent brain power to invent technology which alters the way we view media, it takes imagination.

Speaking of imagination...I could never have imagined that at the age of twenty I would be living in a world where I could interact with a magazine online. It’s defiantly something I don’t dream about, but somebody had the imagination and then the dream to invent the concept of developing an online magazine that readers can interact with.

As the age old cliché goes: what will they think of next? (Sadly, despite the array of information and knowledge we have, no new clichés have been thought of).

Source: Dunkley, David: http://www.viewmagazine.tv/

The uses of user-generated content

User-generated content can spark harsh sneers from journalists, journalists who consider the material worthless and biased. However, Singapore Press Holdings’ online media project, Straits Times Online Multimedia Print (STOMP) has proved user-generated content to be extremely influential on society.

Within half a year after STOMP was launched “it was attracting 300,000 unique visitors a year”. STOMP’s popularity is increasing as it reports stories that would not be reported in national newspapers. For example, a citizen took a photograph of a woman whose boyfriend pushed her onto a train track; STOMP published the photograph and it was used as evidence to arrest the man for attempted murder. If an illegal event takes place it is almost assumed somebody with a mobile phone camera or video will record the situation.

Examples of this has occurred in Australia, with students capturing bullying incidents on their mobiles and leaking it to the media, user-generated content has a lot more uses other than the journalistic side, there is the legal side as well.

Sources

Quinn, S. 2007, ‘Straits Times Online Multimedia Print (STOMP)’, in Innovations in Newspapers.

Keeping up appearances

If you thought trying to remain technological savvy was a challenge, try working in a newspaper! Print media outlets and their journalists are continuously being pressured to keep up to date with the multi media trend and the new forms of journalism it brings rise to.

Technological advancement is impacting the media so quickly that it is not longer appropriate to label blogs, vblogs, moblogs and wikis ‘new media’, the more correct term it ‘now media’.
Print and broadcast journalism need to make some radical changes in order to compete with the fast paced internet, where breaking news can be uploaded onto a webpage in seconds (depending on how fast you can type!). Simon Waldman points out that traditional media needs “to build a news organisation of the future, not just a good web page”, and the greatest challenge hidden in this requirement is: how is this to be achieved?

The issues with trying to compete with ‘now media’ are plentiful and a whole new set of skills is required, this is not something that will happen over night, but with “online advertising revenues growing at 60 per cent” each year, it is something that needs to happen as soon as humanly possible!

Source: Waldman, Simon. 2006. ‘Future-proofing the newsroom’, in UK Press Gazette

Make room for the blog

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question? Never in his wildest dreams would Shakespeare ever imagine that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy would be used as the basis for a blog introduction.
As it has been pointed out in my previous posts, blogging is the latest way to express opinion and communicate information. Blogging may be embraced by the public; however, it is a tad more controversial in the media realm. According to Mike Ward, many journalists are viewing blogs as a threat to mainstream media, and Ward argues that this observation towards blogs has missed the point of what blogs actually stand for.

Ward points out the unlike the traditional types of medium such as print and broadcast, blogging allows a two way method of communication and the “technology never sleeps”. Ward explains this in his own words by stating that blogging is “the publics newly found power to publish information as well as receive it”.

It certainly isn’t just Ward who supports the phenomenon of the blog, many investors have gone to great lengths to ensure they don’t fall behind the investing opportunities that blogging sites provide. Media giant Rupert Murdoch spent $580 million on Myspace.com recently, as these sites have opened up a new empire of advertising opportunities.

One only needs to look at the success of Wikipedia to determine just how other blogging sites will develop, Wikipedia “they now claim more traffic that the CNN website”.
Regardless of whether you have allowed a space for blogging in your life, there is undoubtedly a role for blogs in our media world.

Source: Ward, Mike. 2006, ‘Find a role in the realm of the bloggers’, UK Press Gazette

Oh my blog

At 2:22 pm on 22 February 2007 an internet site that would radically influence the national agenda of Korea’s mainstream media. OhmyNews is a news website that “attracts more than 700,000 repeat visitors each day” and the record number of page visits in a single day was a mere 25 million. OhmyNews has not only attracted the interest of news consumers, by mid 2007 the website has encouraged more than 60,000 citizen reporters.



The approach the OhmyNews takes towards the websites news content is both professional and respectful. All citizen reporters must obey a code of ethics and all of the articles that appear on the site have been edited and factually checked. Thank goodness this is not a website that carelessly displays false information and calls it ‘news’. These factors probably account for the success of the website.

The concept of blogging seems harmless enough, but not when people are claiming that the information posted is both true an accurate. In this age when we are saturated with information we must strive to make sure the news keeps its interiority.

Source: Quinn, S. 2007, ‘OhmyNews in South Korea’ in Rampant Tigers, Konrad Adenaueur Foundation, Singapore.

Some of these journalists are not like the other ones

It appears that there is no longer a distinction of power between the ability of journalists and non journalists when it comes to publication. In July 2005 the BBC established a space for ‘user-generated content’. So what is this UGC? Essentially it is the name given to the information that the public provides media organisations. Would you like an example? Well, after the 2004

Boxing Day tsunami the BBC recieved 25,000 emails from the public and some of these emails would have been the basis for certian media reports.

Non journalists who submit potential news worthy content to media organisations have been coined either ‘citizen journalists’ or ‘participatory journalists’. The boundaries between who is qualified to present a news item are becoming more and more blurred each day, especially with the popularity of blogs and news available on the internet. A man called Steve Safran has a bit to say about user-generated content and its value. Safran loathes the term ‘citizen journalist’ because (in his own words) the term is “self-congratulatory and, frankly, a little smug” (p. 21).
No matter what happens in the future with regards to the user- generated content that seems to be flooded news rooms around the world, journalism cannot depend on one person. True journalism not only requires information, it requires a support structure, editing and a challenge of assumptions.

Non journalists may be invited to submit information, but... not every thing (thankfully) will be used


Source: Safran, S. ‘How Participatory Journalism Works’, in Nieman Reports, vol. 59, no. 2, winter 2005.

The blogging phenomenon

This activity that I’m currently producing is unbelievably and remarkably revolutionary. If I told someone five years ago that blogs would be influencing our culture as much as people like Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and James Joyce did, my mental state would most likely have been questioned. But alas, we’re not just living in the 21st century, we’re immersed in an information age where news can be accessed in a number of seconds and every body is a potential journalist.
The Pew Centre has found in mid 2005 “about 8 million Americans had created blogs and 32 million read them”. So, what exactly does this four letter word mean? The term blog is an “amalgam of web and log”. Blogging is a relatively new, but extremely rapid moving part of the ‘new news’ cycle that is developing more and more each day.

The concept of ‘citizen journalism’ has also emerged out of this ‘new news cycle’. With easy access to multi media technology and the internet people are becoming providers for a great deal of news coverage. The unfortunate event of the 7, July 2005 London bombings has been dubbed the catalyst for citizen reporting. The BBC’s director of news said that “within an hour of the first blast her London newsrooms received 50 emails with pictures and video clips attached”.

And why shouldn’t media consumers contribute to news content? Without a demand for the most detailed and immediate information there would certainly be no supply!

Source: Quinn, S. & Quinn-Allan, D. 2006, ‘User-generated content and the changing news cycle’, in Australian Journalism Review, vol. 28, no.1.

Media convergence

In his article ‘Why and how convergence is emerging’ Stephen Quinn focuses on the social, technological, legal and structural factors which affect media convergence. Once these factors have been considered Quinn looks at how convergence has been developed on a micro and macro level.

The first section of the article that I found particularly interesting was the concept of ‘information overload’. In this fast paced twenty first century our minds are constantly bombarded with advertisements, world news, Australian news, local news and opinions. This long string of information categories is also accompanied by the knowledge we seek to find from the Internet, magazines, books and the lady down the street who likes to fill you in on the latest gossip. Yes, indeed we live in an age when the only way to avoid an information overload is by being extremely selective with the content we store into our brains.

I have never considered that all of the fast paced media convergence occurring is, as Howard Finberg likes to put it a “reflection of society’s move into the information age”. We can now purchase mobile phones that can also act as a camera, video recorder, radio, internet and television and considering the reaction of the public to Apples latest mobile phone (people were camping out in the streets for days to purchase it) society is welcoming media convergence with open arms.


Reference: Quinn, S. 2005, ‘Why and how convergence is emerging’, in Convergent Journalism: the fundamentals of multi-media reporting, New York: Peter Lang.