Evolution Of The Nature Of Journalism
From ancient times, journalism has been affected by technological developments throughout the history. The nature of journalism has always been shaped by industrial changes. The nature of journalism has been evolving from the time when Julius Caesar ordered the Acta Diurna by enabling distribution of information about the major events of the day. Times passed and Gutenberg invented the printing press, which laid the foundation of mass literacy and finally the newspaper. Until Graham Bell discovered a telephone the spread of information about major events relatively low but by inventing a telephone journalism is considered to enter a new era. So that journalists were able to gather and report the news more frequently conducting interviews directly by telephone.
According to John Pavlik (2000) the nature of journalism is changed at least in four ways. Digital era change affects the way how journalists do their job, the nature of news content, the nature of news industry, the nature of relationships among journalists and their audiences.
Innovation has, regardless, applied a central influence on how journalists carry out their jobs. In spite of the fact that the best reporting is news-gathering when the journalist is on the scene, journalists tend to spend progressively less of their time out in the field which disables examining the occasions in details and procedures on which they report.
Since the invention of the phone to the newsrooms, journalists have utilized media communications technology to assemble news. Many, if not most, interviews are led by phone. It might seem alright to many people, yet it is not generally conceivable through the phone to make certain of the non-verbal correspondence that accompanies a verbal answer. Also, it is not generally conceivable to make certain you are addressing to the individual you think you are addressing to.
The Internet has initiated numerous modernizations to journalistic practice, but undoubtedly none more so than the proximity afforded by its ending of sequential boundaries. News organizations are no longer confined to ‘breaking’ news in the morning papers, or prime-time news programs. Instead, media houses are required to continuously renew their websites, delivering superior depth 24 hours a day and seven days a week (Allan 2006). More prominently, participating media, such as social networks, have shaped a forum where all users have the ability and facility to generate and broadcast their own variation of ‘news’. As Solove (2007, 2) highlights, the free movement of information on the Internet ‘delivers mind-blowing innovative opportunities for people to communicate and express themselves’. The problem, for sure, is that most people are not knowledgeable and educated like journalists. They neither attend in any kind of training, nor they practice any form of peer learning, or solely any form of proper media or broadcasting code (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009).
Gao and Armstrong (2010), in a report studying how news institutions use social media platforms, opinion to the research of Gans (2004), who indicates that there is a dissimilarity between topical values and lasting values of news containings. The previous being the quality of the moment, with the latter serving as a more predominant view of society within the news. Gao and Armstrong (2010) claim that Gans’ idea of lasting values like social order, management, leadership ethnocentrism are traditional values which have mostly been taught to journalism students and trainee news producers. Gans describes lasting values as ‘values that can be uncovered in many various news stories over a long period of time. Regularly, they make an influence on what events become news, for some are part and piece of a meaning of news’. In other words, these morals help to define the newsworthiness of a topic. This emphasizes one phase of usual gatekeeping, whereby news that does not encounter these morals is rejected or unnoticed. However, Gao and Armstrong (2010, 220) dispute that the improvement of digital and online technologies has radically altered the news production and brought into question these morals. Scholars propose that as technology develops, traditional journalistic productiveness and industry norms such as responsibility and legitimacy are corroding. Their point is demonstrated by survey results from memberships of the Online News Association, in which a most of online journalists approximately 57% approved that the Internet is altering the major morals and values of journalism. Almost 45% journalists stated that main changes are related with loosening of standards, more external voices (31%) and an increased prominence on speed (25%) (Project for Excellence in Journalism, cited in Armstrong and Gao 2010, 220).
Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2009, 569) also highlight the essential nature of imminence in news broadcasting that has consequently created a culture that, they think, is basically reliant on news organizations and ‘second-hand’ journalism, due to the absence of the time for investigation, cross-checking, and innovative news script. In part, this is a consequence of superior competition between news organizations, as well as a massive amount of user-generated substance in the form of blogs, which spread worthwhile and well-timed information.
