How do you think the Internet is
changing journalism in your home country?
Yes,
there are lot of changes happened in the field of journalism in our country because
of the internet is play a great role in exchanging news and ideas. The Internet
has turned the world of journalism utterly upside down. It has drastically
changed how journalism is now accessed and shared. Well written stories are
hard to come by these days and it’s largely down to the impact the internet is
having on this dying art. You can forget about reporters, readers, features,
tabloids and broadsheets because nowadays it’s all about online ‘dumbed-down’
articles, news feeds, timelines, search engines and page/site views.
Social media and social networks
change the way news is generated and accessed. They influence media in three
dimensions: as a tool for journalists to create content, as a tool to
distribute and impart information, and as a tool to seek, receive and access
information. The exercise of these fundamental rights by journalists and
citizens also relies on unhindered access to the Internet. Internet Access as a
human right Access to and the use of the Internet and all its services –
including social media and social networks – is widely considered a human right
in the 21st century.
As the Internet increasingly becomes
an indispensable tool for all citizens to receive, seek and impart information
across borders, access to the Internet becomes closely linked to the basic
human right to freedom of expression and, therefore constitutes a human right
in itself. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the
Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression in a recent report stated that “the
framework of international human rights law remains relevant today and equally
applicable to new communication technologies such as the Internet.
Social media substantially change the
way of communicating among organizations, communities, as well as individuals
and can take on many different forms, including magazines, Internet forums,
weblogs, micro-blogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, videos,
rating, social bookmarking and social networking.8 Whereas this definition sees
social networking as a part of social media, the distinction between social
media and social networks in reality is blurred. Microblogging services such as
Twitter serve both as personal networking tools and at the same time as a
platform to disseminate news – or even undertake journalistic research. Social
networks such as Facebook or Google+ are used for individual communication, but
more and more also for institutional communication, news distribution, research
through crowd sourcing and many more purposes, including many still to be
developed.
Social media and social networks as tools for journalists
Social networks and social media at the same time offer a great tool for
journalists for research and as a source for stories. Twitter, Facebook or
YouTube offer coverage by other journalists and normal citizens of many events,
including events to which there is limited access for journalists, e.g. for
safety, financial or other reasons. The use of Web 2.0 tools for this form of
research – or ‘crowdsourcing’ – is still underdeveloped and journalists need to
develop skills to check and verify sources in order to guarantee reliable and
accurate information.
Recent cases demonstrated a
considerable lack of fact checking of social media sources by journalists.
Awareness should be raised and tools for journalist training in the use of
social media and social networks should be developed. Social networks and
social media also enable journalists to collaborate with fellow journalists or
citizens (mass collaboration) on the Internet, for examples in wikis or other
tools of online collaboration, or through commenting on articles, fact checking
and making use of the “wisdom of the crowd.” Accountability is an issue, though
when it comes to anonymous wikis and professional journalism ethics should be
further developed in this field
Do you think blogging sites represent a step forward or a step backward
from traditional forms of journalism, and why?
Citizen journalism beyond seeking
information online or simply swapping stories and commenting on them via
e-mail, Internet users also contribute to the creation of news, comment about
it or disseminate news via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They
have done at least one of the following: comment on a news story (25 percent);
post a link on a social networking site (17 percent); tag content (11 percent),
create their own original news material or opinion piece (9 percent), or tweet
about news (3 percent). Among those who get news online, 75 percent get news
forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites and 52 percent
share links to news with others via those means. Blogging, vlogging, posting
videos, aggregating news, sharing articles online and syndicating content are
some of the forms of journalism that the innovative technology of Web 2.0
allows for.
Bloggers widened the scope of
classical journalism and added the new form of “blogging” or “citizen
journalism” to the media landscape. Now, social media and social networks add
even another dimension. The term social media refers to the use of web-based
and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue.
They can be defined as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of the so-called Web 2.0, and that
allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.
There is some controversy over the
term citizen journalism, because many professional journalists believe that
only a trained journalist can understand the rigors and ethics involved in
reporting the news. And conversely, there are many trained journalists who
practice what might be considered citizen journalism by 13 Glaser, Mark (2006)
Your Guide to Citizen Journalism. In: , 27. September 2006. Christian
Möller 29 writing their own blogs or commentary online outside of the
traditional journalism hierarchy.”14
There is pretty big differences in
how we write, depending on whether it’s for a traditional media outlet or for
the blog. I have a more conversational voice on the blog — I think of any given
post as being part of a much broader conversation between bloggers and between
me and my readers. Nearly all of my posts are reactions to something elsewhere
online, and I try to be as generous as I can with links. I’m also not one of
those bloggers who likes breaking news: often I’ll actually wait for the news
to be broken elsewhere before weighing in with my view, since it can be
dangerous to mix subjective opinions into the reporting of hard facts.
Traditional media outlets, by
contrast, generally have an incomprehensible love affair with Microsoft Word —
a piece of software I loathe and try to use as little as possible. It’s
generally more difficult to insert links, especially when I’m dealing with
people who edit for print first and who then just put that edited copy up
online. The pieces have to be much more self-contained, and you have to be much
more careful about assuming any kind of expertise on the part of your readers:
if they’re reading your stuff on paper, then it’s much harder for them to
Google anything they don’t understand.
The upside of traditional media is that you generally put a
lot more time and effort into reporting, editing, and illustrating stories.
They go through many iterations before being published, and nearly every
iteration makes them better. What you lose in quantity, you often make up in
quality.
