While the change towards spring weather has not yet shown up here in Aurora, Ill., the winds of change remain constant in the journalism profession.
The journalism profession has undergone significant changes as society has transitioned into the 21st century. A heavier reliance on technology, and the further development of the 24-hour news cycle to satisfy society’s thirst for news around the clock, has forced the majority of journalists to adapt to a revolution in the business. The new, technological-savvy journalist has to be willing to accept new responsibilities to stay ahead of others in the field.
The days of simply covering an event, writing a story, and getting it into an editor by a deadline are essentially gone for a journalist. The technological influence has expanded the duties of journalists around the world. Journalists are not only expected to tell a story to their readers with text in a newspaper or online artifact, rather, they have to find ways to show their readers what the story looks and sounds like.
Journalists must become backpack journalists, meaning that they must be equipped with pen, paper, laptop, tape recorder, and camera to recreate the story for their audience (“Journalism definition,” 2010). With online publications growing, journalists can make their audience feel apart of the actual news experience with pictures and audio from the event, and video of the story as it unfolds (Bardoel and Deuze, 2001).
Blogging has become a huge part of a professional journalist’s ability to connect with their audience on a daily basis. By keeping a relatively active blog, journalists can keep updating a story they wrote throughout the day, ask blog readers questions about the story, and directly communicate with them in real-time.
Blogging allows journalists to provide more personality and immediacy to their published piece than ever before (Morozov, 2005). The informal type of setting allows the journalist to add more color or sometimes opinion to their article to give more in-depth insight to what they are reporting on. All of these factors can give more credibility to the journalist’s work (Morozov, 2005).
References
Bardoel, J. & Deuze, M. (2001). ‘Network Journalism’: Converging competencies of old and new media professionals and professionalism. Australian Journalism Review 23 (2), 91-103. Retrieved from http://jclass.umd.edu/classes/jour698m/BardoelDeuze+NetworkJournalism+2001.pdf
Journalism definition. (2010, March 31). Retrieved from http://www.american.edu/soc/backpack/definition.cfm
Morozov, A. (2005). Minding the gap: An ethical perspective on the use of weblogs in journalistic practice. 1-27. Retrieved from http://students.washington.edu/amorozov/AMorozov_Weblogs_and_Journalism_Ethics.pdf
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