Technology: why it’s good for journalists
New online media pose a dire threat to journalism, to journalists, and to their union. That’s a common view.
But VIVIEN SANDT thinks differently.
She is a journalist who is producing a special report on the new media industry for the NUJ, and she says that the new jobs being created are a tremendous opportunity for journalists — and for the union, which can expand its traditional definitions of journalism to open up huge new fields for recruitment and organisation.
EVER SINCE the printing press put the town crier out of business, the evolution of the news industry has been driven largely by technology. But today journalists face the challenges posed by evolving technology as never before.
The personal computer, the digital camera, the mobile phone — and, above all, the internet — have challenged traditional journalism on almost every front. The global uptake of digital media has spawned user generated content and citizen journalism; the video journalist and the blogger; virtual worlds; social networking sites and the massively multiplayer online game. All these are redefining journalism, and the nature and role of the journalist.
News is breaking all over the place in cyberspace, on blogs, on Twitter, on picture and video-sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, on virtual worlds and on social networking sites. Today, bloggers are journalists and journalists are bloggers.
The boundaries between news, entertainment and sport, usually clearly demarcated in traditional media, have become fudged, and even the hallowed editorial/advertising divide is becoming non-existent. The internet is a hotchpotch of current affairs and celeb-frippery, infotainment and sports “news”; cyber activism and social networking; a place where clips of cute kittens sit side-by-side with torture videos; a market place, a meeting place, a place for pornography, for self promotion or for education. It is a one-stop leisure and entertainment complex, and news has had to take its place among a wide range of information options.
The digital age has also changed the way news is gathered and disseminated. Journalists use the internet and mobile phones to gather news. Last November, two enterprising journalists even interviewed two avatars on Second Life, to scoop the “first virtual world divorce” story (see opposite).
Most of us are already new media journalists. Reporters, writers, sub-editors and news editors ... these traditional journalism roles are to be found in interactive internet-based media, and on new platforms — most strikingly at a new generation of digital media agencies harnessing the internet for advertising, public relations, marketing, e-learning and e-commerce ... an endless list of human commerce and activity.
New media journalists ply their trade on a multitude of platforms, with online newspapers being only the most obvious. Virtual worlds, computer games and mobile phone applications ... all these are frontiers of the new media world.
Reuters runs a newsgathering operation on Second Life, and Games for Change develops online games to explain news events. The newsgathering phenomenon of 2008, Twitter, was conceived as a social networking tool but has armed an army of citizen journalists (and the “celebrity journalists” like Stephen Fry) and even spawned a news agency, BNO News.
SO WHERE does all this leave journalists, and the NUJ? It is actually good news for journalists, who have tended to fear that digital media and the internet are a threat to their jobs and area of expertise. Traditional journalism skills such as editing and writing are easily transferable to digital media jobs and, indeed, will be at a premium.
It is also good news for the NUJ, which has a huge new pool for potential recruitment. Traditionalists with firm ideas on the division between “journalist” on one hand, and PR, advertising and information and communication technology (ICT) workers on the other, will find their views challenged.
But the NUJ faces the challenge of embracing and including a new generation of journalists. The traditional definition of news gatherer may have to be extended to include digital media content producers, wherever they work.
ICT workers could be the new new media journalists. Some, for instance, are creating and editing education software, or content for online games. Web developer, interface designer and front-end developer are just a few of the job titles that could be embraced by the NUJ.
In October it was reported that advertising spending on the internet has overtaken TV spend for the first time: a record £1.75 billion was spent online in the first half of 2009, compared with £1.64 billion for TV, according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Television had been the leading advertising medium for half a century and it has taken the web little more than a decade to surpass it.
And where the money goes is where the jobs of the future are going to be created.
Vivien Sandt, a former newspaper journalist who retrained in digital media, is undertaking an NUJ research project into employment patterns in the new media industry in the UK and Ireland. She is producing a research paper to be presented at the union’s annual conference in Southport in November, where the issues will be debated.
She is compiling a database of new media companies. If you know of any directories, lists, databases, and so on, of new media companies, contact her on newmedianow.sandt@googlemail.com.