Internet and Journalism

Journalism is the practice of researching and reporting of events, concerns and trends to a broad audience. Although there is much dynamism within journalism, the ideal is to inform the citizenry. Besides covering organizations and institutions such as government and business, journalism also covers cultural facets of society such as arts and entertainment. The field includes jobs such as editing.

Journalism has come a long way. From traditional media (which we still use now) such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines, journalism has paved its way in to reaching out to the masses (public) substantially. Although much can be said about the lack of immediate feedback from the readers as these adopt less of a transactional form of communication. However so, traditional media is still the prime source of information output. Viewers still turn on the television set or read the morning papers to catch up on hard news and breaking news coverage.

With that being said, there has been a shift towards online news coverage. From online forums and news channels to citizen journalism, news reporting and writing has been geared towards the tech savvy and the generation of people who are pretty much dependent on the new media for news feeds.

According to an article written for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author Kendyl Salcito has drawn positive and negative viewpoints on the shift to online journalism such as interactivity for one whereby there has been an increased ability of the public to source out information and interact online with new websites in search of news. This apparently encourages the exposure to greater diversity of content.

However, there were some negative views drawn such as the lack of journalistic credibility. As much newsworthy and noteworthy the articles these online journalists write may seem, they may not be journalists in real life. Furthermore, the strong opinionated articles written by journalists could come off as propagandistic and this may significantly alter the perceptions of the readers.

So which is better? The question is not to compare and choose one over the other. It is to sieve through and be discerning with your choice of news medium you would like to use. There are some news we would like to find out through traditional medium as the trust is already established with regards to credibility and news source. Other more entertaining news could gather more viewer-ship from the online sources. Here's a video discussing the prevalence of internet journalism and how it is affecting information generated from traditional media. They speak of mergers of social media and traditional media and so forth.