Journalism through the years has changed dramatically. From the basic print newspaper that towns used to dwell upon to receive their news each day, to now having the world wide web with news sites, newspapers, and magazines updating news every minute, one can see that time has greatly effected journalism. Two ways that the field of journalism has changed are convergence and consolidation.
Convergence in journalism is when news and information is provided in more than one format, using effective formats to serve news audience in a very fragmented public, and also combining to create a larger journalistic project. In other words, it is how journalism has adapted over the years to improve with technology, resulting with using multi media and its components. In the years past, the work of journalists was read only by print- in newspapers or magazines. Today, this is not the case. Journalists can post their articles in many different ways to reach their audience. This is due to the creation of the internet. They can post their stories on online newspapers, online magazines, blogs, and even online news sites. The whole world is able to access the journalist's reports. This convergence of journalistic technology has positive and negative effects. When looking at the positive side, the internet and all of its different sources to post news for journalists has broadened their readership. New jobs have begun to develop like blogging. On the other hand, journalists may experience a lot of repetition. With so many news sites, newspapers, and magazines, the top news is surely to be repeated on many of them. This can make it hard for a journalist's work to stand out. For example, looking at different articles about the disaster in Haiti, I compared an article from the New York Times to one from the Bangor Daily News. I liked the New York Times article better. This can trickle down badly for the Bangor Daily News, and the same thing goes for smaller newspapers. If they are losing readership because people are able to access the larger newspapers like the New York Times online, jobs will be lost. In the year 2008, 16,000 people lost their jobs at newspapers and only 3,000 people were working on the internet to compose news (1).
Now, moving on to the other topic of how journalism has changed, consolidation. Consolidation is when a large number of media outlets are owned by a small number of business owners and conglomerates. In other words, it's a unification of companies. Consolidation has ultimately hurt the field of journalism. It has made people loose many jobs and decrease the number of newspapers. For example, the popular Wall Street Journal, was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in the year 2007 (2). This family owned newspaper lost with a 5 billion dollar agreement for Murdoch to take over. This put many journalists out of their job. This is a frequent occurrence right now in journalism. Hopefully we can still keep newspapers and not let consolidation take total control.
Improvements in technology has impacted the field of journalism and has created heated discussion throughout the world. I believe that the field of journalism needs to be up to date with the technology at this point in time, but I do not believe that jobs need to be taken away. The convergence concerning the different ways to release news from online creates a fast, up-to-date way to inform the world about about is happening. I think that just as many people need to work for these sites as a newspaper would have. This would help with getting even more news out, quicker and preserving journalism jobs.
Referecences:
1) Gayle, Damien. Media for All: Solving convergence and ownership consolidation problems. November 3, 2009. Journalism.co.uk. http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/editors/2009/11/03/media-for-all-solving-convergence-and-ownership-consolidation-problems/.
2) Ellison, Sarah. Karnitschnig, Matthew. Murdoch Wins His Bid for Dow Jones. August 1, 2007. The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118589043953483378.html?mod=special_coverage.
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