The emergence of new technologies and their significance in the globalized world today had affected our daily life immensely. These include the transnational network of political, economic, cultural, and social activity which is interconnected to one another (Reese et al, 2007).
To be specific, we are now in the era of the wired world where nearly everything is connected to the digital core. In this matter, the journalism industry has undergone massive transformation where traditional journalism such as the newspaper is subsequently challenged by the surfacing of web-based online journalism (Allan, 2006).
The public tends to turn their favor by reading news on the Internet rather than flipping through the print newspaper like it used to be. As it is reported in BBC News Online (1998), ‘newspaper circulation has been falling for years…’ The rise of online news brings a new dimension on what the public defines news and how they recognize ‘…who can be a journalist in ways which continue to reverberate today’ (Allan, 2006: p. 10).
The new technologies are basically referring to the electronic devices like computers, laptops, video camcorders, digital cameras, and mobile phones (Herbert, 2000) which can be connected to the Internet and that includes the websites (Deuze, 2001) like Blogs, Youtube, Twitter, BBC iPlayer and other tools as a mean of communications and information systems.
In this essay, I will explore how the new technologies take place in changing the daily basis of journalists’ work. Explicitly, this essay will analyze the effects of new technologies had on news reporting in terms of Internet publishing which covers the area of the modifications in the newsgathering process, the apprehension of news content quality, and the up-to-the-minute presentation of news. Towards the end, I shall examine the new challenges that the Internet has inflicted on journalists in the digital era.
The modifications in the newsgathering process
According to Herbert, (2000) ‘the digital age is changing journalism forever’ (p: 2). Technological advancements have made it easy for journalists to search for facts and more information (Herbert, 2000). The Internet enables journalists to find additional details regarding the issue they are covering.
It is a virtual place where any kind of information can be found without the hustle of going out and take a longer time to gather information. Floridi (1995) proposes the Internet as an ‘international system of digital communication, emerging from the agglomerate of thousands of networks that interact through a number of common protocols all over the world’ (p. 263) hence it can be alternative sources that provide the vast number of information. Nevertheless, Allan (2006) argues that journalists have to distinguish which source could be trusted since anyone is accessible to the Internet and thus it makes it more complicated to establish verification.
Even though it is not deniable that technology capabilities contributed to shaping news-gathering practices, Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, (2009) suggest that journalists however doubt the Internet as a reliable source in doing so. A survey conducted in the United Kingdom in 2000 found that not all journalists (only two-third) have access to the Internet and the idea that journalists spent their time surfing the Internet [looking for story ideas] was laughed at by more than one journalist’ (Nicholas et al, 2004: p. 104, in Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009, p. 568).
It is apparent that journalists are obligated to their news organizations and working under the pressure of deadline would expose them to any kind of misinformation (Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009), and a scholar suggests digital systems perhaps would also bring vicious effects which the news organizations could not afford to face such as libel suit (Klinenberg, 2005 in Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009).
Apart from that, the development of weblogs or blogs, it made possible for the public to participate in providing news as they no longer want to wait for the mainstream media to spoon-feed their hunger for news (Allan, 2006). This phenomenon creates a new platform in journalism which is known as ‘citizen journalism’ (Thurman, 2008) where the public who act upon themselves report breaking news or write stories from a different angle as opposed to the stories that mainstream media provided.
It becomes an open place for the public to speak out their mind by connecting with more people and so they can debate and have a discussion on whatever issues that are matter to them. Dahlgren and Sparks, (1991) would describe it as a public sphere which suggests that ‘it is a concept which in the context of today’s socie