03/10/2017
Since the beginning of the century, the traditional journalism has been facing a frustrating conflict, with no solution at sight. The Digital Era, which mainly started at 2004, keeps challenging the news media, while offering it groundbreaking opportunities.
Nowadays, traditional informative platforms are being replaced by the world wide web. One of the data that shows it is the 30% selling drop in newspapers in 2009. The financial crisis that came around 2008 not just economically wounded all businesses including journalism as it aggravated the media installing crises which started a decade before.
Jeff Jarvis declares that “newspapers are going to die, but not news”, enhancing the chance the digital brought to journalism: “now news are cheaper, because there are cheaper ways of getting information and of sharing it.”
Due to Web 2.0, newspapers are seeing themselves obligated to get down from their authority level and interact with the public. It is, though, an opportunity to receive information from their audience and to better meet them, while receiving feedback (and helping the advertisers). Online journalism now should out its sources of information, instead of hiding them, and link its readers to an endless inception of contextualization, that was before limited to space. Also the linear routine needs to be replaced by the hypertext and the multilinear one.
The information, which used to be a scarce good, in the current world is infinite — and that brought to journalists the challenge of specializing in choosing data and hierarchizing it. The way of telling a story should include by multimedia or transmedia, in order to survive in the extremely visual online world and to tell the story in an attractive way in the overloaded informative digital environment.
These are obstacles that came to interrupt the repeated model using way of making journalism, but are, at the same time, huge opportunities for building a better information service to societies. And though it needs to be constantly adapting, it is the very essence of this business — to change with the technological development.
Journalism might survive, but it is probably going to suffer a lot (to the point in which it is questionable if it is what it declares to be): through the need of bettering their SEO, in order to be on the Google’s top; through addressing more shocking or sensationalist topics, in order to get more attention; and through creating mistakes leading clickbait titles, in order to increase their page views number.
And, while Wikileaks, the blogs, the news aggregators and the tweets seem to be swallowing journalism piece by piece, people still need someone to contact the sources, to go into the streets and to have a critic look at the information. They just need it to be faster and more dynamic.
