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.