The Future of Journalism
Those of you who look keen-eyed over the jobs section in newspapers must have noticed the journalism vacancies advertised by The Guardian over the past month.
With advertising, circulation and staff all being subject to cuts, it’s surprising to see a 12 month freelance position up for grabs. The Guardian is recruiting “beatbloggers” in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh to document happenings in the community, as part of the Guardian Local campaign. While jobs in the media are slim pickings at the moment (does anyone still work in newspapers, or are we just reading archive manuscripts?) it’s reflective of the way the media will evolve in the future.
Citizen journalism, it seems, is the way forward.The ascent of blogging, social networking and rapid upload means that anyone can be a journalist, anywhere.While this raises issues about the quality of journalism being sustained, the fact remains that the media has been democratised like never before. With local newspapers in rapid decline, there is a fear that local authorities will be allowed to become corrupt. However, this hyper-local style of citizen reporting could help keep checks and balances on public institutions, as well as giving opportunity to people who traditionally saw the media as a closed and elitist world.
Getting a job in the media, and in particular as a journalist, has never been more difficult, but at this rate, the balance has somewhat been shifted in the advantage of the individual, not the organisation. The New York Times and Newsweek have announced massive cuts, and are panicking as to what to do next. We’re talking huge companies here, who are scrabbling around desperately to find ways to sustain their outdated business models.
Meanwhile an army of online bloggers provide easily accessible opinion and art available online for free. Granted, the development of the blog as a popular media platform has meant that a lot of self indulgent, narcissistic material gets produced. But at the same time, global networks are being set up between users, content is freely exchanged, criticised and promoted. At last month’s Journalism Leaders conference in Preston, Frederic Filloux, author of Monday Note blog, stated that the future lay in the mobile phone, and once technology was significantly improved, we would truly be able to produce and have access to news 24 hours a day.
I always think that there will be room for good quality analysis and comment in newspapers. I’ve yet to see anything that’s available exclusively online, bar The Huffington Post, that can consistently outclass broadsheet newspapers. But maybe I’m missing the point. Instead, online journalism needs to find it’s own niche. There’s no going back from this, the internet has opened up a whole range of opportunities to the media and to the individual. Where we go from here is unclear, but what is clear is that media corporations will have to gain greater understanding of the way the web works and how people want their news.
Joseph Stashko-Adamaszek
Wow, hope for more of the same writing when it’s all up and running!
Great article!