All of the technologies that
journalism has embraced since the telegraph have reflected the twin desires for
speed and increased efficiencies (Quinn, 2008). The history of journalists’ use
of news gathering technologies illustrates this point: tools like long-distance
telephone, the satellite phone and portable electronic news gathering kits used
in Afghanistan and Iraq, are all examples of this evolution. Journalists and
the news making process continue to adapt to the continuous emergence of new
technology and its capabilities making the life in a newsroom today more
technologically complex (Boczkowski, 2005). Today, the job of a journalist now
involves the use of multiple tools to produce multiple types of content on more
platforms. The most cited example of this new idea was the Tampa Tribune’s
“temple of convergence,” a $40 million product that Media General built to
combine the newsrooms of the Tampa
Tribune, the NBC-Affiliate WFLA-TV and a cluster of Websites under the TBO.com
(Tampa Bay Online) umbrella. This shift focused heavily on “multimedia
reporting,” ensuring that journalists significantly changed their work
practices to accommodate each outlet ranging from newspaper reporters doing TV
standups, to the multimedia editors acting as the liaison between WFLA-TV, the Tribune, and TBO.com. The converged
newsroom appealed to many media managers, however the overall reality was
underwhelming. As stated by Ulrik Haagerup (2002), an award-winning newspaper
journalist from Denmark, convergence “is like teenage sex, everyone thinks
everybody is doing, but the few who are doing it aren’t very good at it.
History has shown that journalists adopt new
technologies for newsgathering if the tools are easy to use and accelerate
newsgathering (Quinn, 2009). While mobile
journalism may be easy to use there are potential consequences that go with
adopting mobile devices as a way to gather news. Rogers (1995) defines a
consequence as the changes that occur to an individual or a social system as a
result of the adoption or rejection of an innovation. Journalism, as a
practice, a product, and a profession is undergoing rapid and dramatic
structural change (Singer, 2010). The line between the journalist and the
audience is more blurred than ever; audiences are now contributing to the
content produced and play an integral role in the newsgathering process,
however this creates an infringement on journalistic boundaries (Lewis,
2012). News decision judgment conveys
status and authority which the audience should not have
that kind of power; accepting the idea of mobile journalism in the newsroom
could denounce journalist’s authority and status. The boundaries between a journalist and the
public is not only in the practice, but in the professional indicators in the
field, such as the expensive camera gear used in newsrooms versus the
inexpensive camera on a mobile device that can be accessed by anyone. The
question is what will these boundaries look like if journalists were to use
mobile phones for news reporting.
References:
Boczkowski, P.
(2005). Digitizing the news: Innovation
in online newspapers. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Haaagerup, U. (2002).
"Convergence and the Newsroom Culture," speech presented at Defining Convergence: 3rd
International Ifra Newsroom Summit.
Lewis, S. (2012). The
tension between professional control and open participation. Information Communication &
Technology, 15, 836-866.
Quinn, S. (2009).
Mobile journalism enables newspapers to provide real-time coverage online, Innovations in newspapers. 66-69
Rogers, E. (1995).
Diffusion of Innovations. 4th Ed. New York: Free Press.
Singer, J. B. (2010).
Journalism ethics amid structural change. Daedalus,
2, 89-99.
