What shifts are occurring in journalism?
These are the shorthand notes that Howard Rheingold took as the students each identified a shift. Please feel free to expand or correct your own shifts:
- Virtual communities have become mainstream
- Online activities have become important means of identity formation and expression
- Online sites have become aggregators of mood and emotion
- Multimedia, especially video, has become viral
- People who were formerly isolated are able to form communities
- Sites like Pandora enable people to individualize their experience - Technology has changed the way that people consume. People expect products to be more personable, convenient, and easy to use. With Google News, in lieu of a newspaper's own front page, a reader can create his own - a meta page consisting of whatever topics and stories he chooses (pooling from a wide variety of sources). (BYu)
- As online activity has beome more important, so has the digital divide -- know-how as well as access
- The mobile telephone has become an Internet access device
- Net media are affecting events (e.g., the video of the student tasered by security guards at UCLA)
- The way reporting is done is changing
- Citizen journalism is emerging
- People have multiple presentations and multiple publics
- Advertisements are not identified as such
- Interactivity is becoming part of web news sites
- Independent film distribution has found a new global channel
- Noise, disinformation, gossip, and crap are proliferating
- Social spaces are becoming commercialized
- Regulation and fear of regulation are becoming important issues
- Corporations and celebrities are end-running journalists
- The news cycle has changed in that it is now instantaneous and continuous. People or organizations looking for publicity have more options than just winning the daily paper or broadcast cycle, and journalists can now post (and break) stories almost instantaneously. News is also now on demand for consumers (which is related to the news cycle). People can access news by their cell phones or computers almost anywhere and anytime (service permitting).
- New media has become a business unit
- Personalization of personal representation
