Technology and Journalism

Most of us know that the print media industries are facing increasing competitions and challenges ever since with the revolution of technology, and journalists realized the nature of their profession had changed with the existing of World Wide Web. As a result, we are witnessing a huge progression of the information technology revolution in our contemporary society today, as there are mass overload of media technologies available to the public. Hence, everyone can be a writer and contribute their social opinions in the global debates on the online public sphere of the Internet. (Just like right now I am sitting in front of my laptop and is blogging on such topic on blogspot.com!) Furthermore, with the introduction of Web2.0, people now can educate themselves to international news around the world that are beyond their local communities, and raise greater awareness to the current affairs in a much faster way.

To the question of how will technology affects traditional journalism? Well, in my opinion, traditional journalism will still survive, but the operations on the profession will be different now, since Internet is creating a global, interconnected and real-time cyberspace for journalism. Blogspot had became a so-called 'mainstream' media, whereby it is maturing greater numbers of online audiences, and is renewing journalism at the same time. Thus, I feel that besides serving for ownselves, blogs also serve for communities who have the similar opinions as well, and every one will be communicating on the virtual space and there will be continuous flow of information. These mean that the job scopes of journalists are no longer just writing on papers, but also to create interactive platforms through the uses of social media, such as Twitter, Blogspot and FaceBook. For example, to research and come up with news videos and radio podcasts for the online audiences. Thus, new media/social networking sites lead to the print media industries are no longer the gatekeeper of information, and people can retrieve different angles of a news from different sources of online websites.

As a whole, I believe innovation is the core reason that drives the revolution of technology, which in turn, creates popular social media on the web and allows more voices to be heard. Of course, makes journalists exposed to different media and different types of storytellings.