Technology and Journalism

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. 4^th Ed. New York: Free Press.

Singer, J. B. (2010). Journalism ethics amid structural change. Daedalus, 2, 89-99.