Background:
What is
Journalism?
One of the earliest accounts of journalism, according to Britannica’s article “Journalism” by Kathleen Kuiper, was a news carved into stone or metal by the Acta Diurna that was passed around from before 56 BCE in ancient Rome. Kuiper states that the Acta Diurna was able to record major daily events, including public speeches, on stone and place it in popular public areas for all of Rome to read. The first regularly published newspapers later appeared in Germany and Antwerp circa 1609 (Kuiper, par.2). With the creation of the telegraph and afterward the radio and television, the way in which we communicated drastically changed. Thus, it drastically changed Journalism itself. With news leaks and confidential sources only a phone call away or news reports ready to be broadcasted all over the television for people to see, journalistic activity was forced to expand and catch up with the speed of the present (Kuiper, par.4).
The introduction of the 20th-century satellites and then the Internet forced what we once knew as high tech into the forgotten past. With the focus placed on speed of communication, causing Twitter feeds and other application algorithms to rise in its value, journalism has changed in an unimaginable way as a byproduct of New Media (Kuiper, par.5). As Lev Manovich states in his book The Language of New Media, “Today we are witnessing the emergence of a new media- the meta medium of the digital encounter” (6). When Manovich refers to the internet as a met medium he is addressing the fact that technology has allowed for there to be a plethora of combinations between digital media (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok) in order to deliver a message to a wide audience.
Because of this new ability for platforms that the internet has permitted, we are living at the forefront of journalism. It is an age where virtually all information is accessible at your fingertips, and on different platforms that sometimes merge. Journalists now find themselves pressed to keep up with the speed of technology and the intake of information from audiences. Which is exactly where my interests in this topic lay, understanding the leaps and bounds taken to achieve everything that journalists have in such a communication based and ultimately competitive time. To better encapsulate the effect of this transition online with journalism the changes will be examined by sections which are the elimination of the role of gatekeeping information; the audience’s new ability to directly contribute to the news; and the new manners of information processing that the public, as well as journalists, engage in.
Work Cited
Kuiper, Kathleen. “Journalism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/journalism.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2000.