It is fascinating to look back over a relatively short time and see just how much has changed, and how quickly, as people around the world adopt the web more fully into their lives. This really raises big questions about how much more change the next 10 years alone will see, and also how much further uptake of current and future technologies and forms of communication there will be.

The universal adoption of blogs also shows how people are now aware that there is a forum in which they can communicate with the world, without any of the barriers they face with traditional media forms. Many bloggers have gone on the write books or been asked to write columns for papers and magazines, so the little old (10 years now!) blog has grown up to become the launch pad of much bigger things, as well as a revolutionary communication medium (see week 11, Blogging from Burma, for more on this).

The sad thing is that Barger, who introduced a medium that has become immensely popular and well-used around the world, and is also a vital component for our assessment in this subject, is now homeless and penniless.

They all use digital cameras now, so the old darkrooms have been removed. When they are out on a few jobs and don’t have time to back to the office, they load the photos onto their laptop and email them back. This means images can instantly be loaded onto the website. Their news website is still not making them money, but they are trying to figure out ways that it can.

In the newsroom itself, they are constantly on the net searching for updates to breaking stories and look at other sites for new stories. I also saw some journalists search a Myspace website for pictures and information about a girl who is rumoured to be the girlfriend of a sports star.

All the journalists are meant to be getting blackberries next year, so they can instantly email stories back to the office and to the website if they are out on the road.
When there was a train accident they also used pictures from witnesses who had taken photos on their mobile phones.

So there are aspects of the “changing newsroom” that we have looked at over this semester, but in many ways it seems that they are still catching up and are still developing their online content. Actually the fact that they are only just now building a dedicated office area for the online department shows that it is still something they are adapting to and integrating into their media system.

In her article Burma Bloggers journalist Jane Holroyd writes that:

“Savvy young bloggers in Burma are breaking through the military junta’s tight internet controls to post photos and videos of swelling anti-government protests.”

“Many of these images have been picked up by mainstream news organisations because bloggers have managed to capture images that no one else can get.”

It is fantastic to see the internet and blogs being used as tools to spread the news about events taking place in a country that Reporters Without Borders describes as having one of the most restrictive media in the world for press freedoms.

I only hope the bloggers can continue to get around the military’s censorship of the internet to campaign for democracy to an international audience, who may also be motivated by the internet to stand up and help the Burmese people.

I also hope that those who have risked their lives by using the net to inform the rest of the world about the protests and the consequent military action remain safe and free from the persecution of the junta.

I believe that there will be even more of a growth in the popularity of newer media forms, such as blogs, wikis and citizen journalism, as more people embrace the idea that they too can express their stories from their part of the world, share their knowledge and have their say in an international forum. The idea that people with specific knowledge would write blogs and columns is an excellent one as well, although it would take jobs away from journalists if the industry is going to become so condensed.

Just as the last few years have seen the meteoritic rise of before unknown technologies and applications (eg Podcasts, cameraphones, Facebook, Skype etc) I’m also sure that there are many more such things around the corner! What they are and how they will fit into the media environment I don’t know…

How we could fit more (new) forms of media into our lives though, I can not imagine, especially as I multitask my media use already…an average evening has the TV on, my laptop in front of me, my mobile next to me and the day’s papers spread out around me as I continually flit from one to the other…

As for the outlook for journalists, if there is going to be such a convergence in the media industry, a great convergence of skills will be required from everyone. This not only means there will be a much greater competition for jobs, as just being a good writer/researcher will no longer be enough, and only people with excellent skills across all areas of media production will be employed. As a student who is about to graduate, and who doesn’t have advanced skills in all those areas, this is a daunting prediction.

It also means that institutions, such as universities, will have to adapt their courses to not only teach that journalism is going to change, but to teach students the skills to cope with and excel in that change.

There was an interesting blog on theage.com this week however, headlined “Journalism must adapt to change”, by Paul Chadwick, which discusses the need for media self-regulation and transparency.

One of his main points though was “the potential inherent in technological changes have made everyone with access to the internet and sufficient hardware and software a ‘publisher’ or ‘broadcaster’.”

This made me think of what we have learnt so far about citizen journalism and blogging and look at if from another perspective: that of the journalist who has been trained and has worked in the methods of “traditional journalism”. When we’ve been studying these concepts I have been excited that there is a way that I can partake in a form of journalism even though I am still only a student, but Chadwick looks at the other aspects of particapartory journalism: how it drives media companies to be continually self-examining.

This is a good thing in the case of transparency and ethics, but not always so, in the case of the resignation in March 2007 of Los Angeles Times opinion page editor Andres Martinez, as bloggers accused him of a conflict of interest and he was forced to resign by the paper.

Chadwick closes with the comment: “Journalism can only fulfil its proper role in a free society if it is agile and alert to change.” This also seems to be the main point that we as students are having drilled into us, and is also the driver behind the development of this unit, ALJ301, because journalism is changing, and that is a process that is happening now.

Felix Soh oversees Stomp. He talks about how convergence has affected news presentation and about how we expect news to be constantly up-to-date. “We live in a multi-source world when it comes to getting information and news,” Soh said. “I get breaking news on my mobile phone. Mobile is big for breaking news.”

Like what Wright said about journalists (see last week’s post), Soh said all journalists employed on Stomp needed a fresh and creative outlook, to come up with innovative ideas for multimedia news.

Through Stomp, Soh wants newspapers to interact more with their audiences and help form communities, like Kathleen McCoy (see last week’s post), who discussed the importance of building a community when it comes to news. “How do we make them feel part of the paper? Through online social networking sites,” said Soh.

It seems fitting then that I was reading a wall posting on a friend’s Facebook profile, where her dad, an accountant for a Fairfax newspaper wrote: “Hi……find it all a bit confusing at the moment….but thought it was worth a look…..we are moving ahead big time at work with more enhanced digital services through the Fairfax group, so a good way to see how ‘your generation’ are using this sort of technology for social networking etc. cheers Dad.”

This just shows how using social networking sites to capture online communities which can then be channeled into news audiences and news-creating communities is happening as we speak!

Wright closes by writing that it is up to the journalists and journalism students of today to learn the current tools of industry so they can go out and define the “style” of news writing for the web for tomorrow.

In his blog, buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis, the associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program for the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism, writes about examples of this happening.

In his posting My heroines, August 28th, 2007, Jarvis writes; “We hit kismet on so many fronts: the value of collaborative community journalism, the distributed architecture of news, the value of reporting vs. commodity news, the future of newsrooms and how to get them there, the growth of video from papers — and unlike me, she’s not just talking about it, she’s doing it. I love seeing people who are making progress bringing newspapers into the future.”

He then writes about Kathleen McCoy, assistant managing editor for interactivity at the paper in Anchorage, who has been working on building community news organizations.
On her blog she says “We work for the readers. So if they can contribute some of the content that binds a community - names, faces, achievements, good work - then the newspaper’s reporters can focus on their role, getting at the hard and complicated truth, facts people need to know.”

This highlights the ways in which citizen reporters and bloggers can be useful to the mainstream media outlets, and how they can incorporate what they have to say into news for public dissemination.

Both of these examples have shown me the value of citizen journalists and bloggers, as discussed in the reading, but also how important it is to be capable of using current technology and about the continued search to find the best style of news reporting that combines all of these technologies.

I’m heading up to Sydney soon, on the same weekend that the APEC summit happens to be on. After joining OMNI and learning how to edit audio files in this week’s readings I am considering doing some “on the street” stories while I am there…will see how that goes.

This ties in neatly though with the comment Reuters chief, Tom Glocer, made in this week’s reading: “I believe the world will always need editing… the role of old media companies in the new-media age is that of content facilitator, tools provider and editor.” The editors at OhmyNews must receive copious amounts of material and they have to decide what is relevant, and what is of a good enough quality to use. The article I wrote is about the Pulp Mill being planned for Northern Tasmania. The fact that the article is on a very current issue no doubt helped it to be posted on the main page so quickly.

On another note, the following opinion from the reading fits in well with what I wrote about Facebook in some of my first posts: “Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently told the FT Digital Media and Broadcast conference that mainstream media should now focus its mind on connecting with the growing number of online communities and social networks.” There’s a whole youth network out there if people are willing to tap into it…

It has revolutionised world journalism and brought great attention to the notion and practice of citizen journalism. I was very inspired to hear how a simple idea Oh had as an undergraduate was eventually implemented to be a huge international success.

As far as online media goes, OhmyNews is far ahead of its competitors in the newspaper industry who have since extended into online news as well. Primarily this is because OhmyNews was designed specifically for the internet, and has been able to capitalise on the use of online advertising. OhmyNews also has a far greater resource of journalists (60,000 citizen reporters who submit about 200 stories a day) than printed-news companies do.

What I found very interesting, and a little sad, is how after the founders and citizen journalists of OhmyNews have managed to help shake up the tight hold the South Korean political system has traditionally had on the nation’s media, Korean journalists now face another issue: the pressure from advertisers. This is an issue western journalists have had to deal with for a long time already. It is a good thing that OhmyNews strives to maintain editorial integrity, free from the powerful influence of the advertisers.

Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of Ohmynews, believed that “Citizen Reporters can be called guerrillas, because they are not professional and regulars and they post news from perspectives uniquely their own, not those of the conservative establishment.”

At first I thought that “guerrillas” would only be necessary in a media environment such as what exists in South Korea, not here in Australia. And then I thought, or are they? Maybe we do need guerrilla citizen reporters here.

Just because I may not be aware of a need to break through any repressive regimes in our own country’s media, that is more likely to be because I am under the influence of the media and do not question the need for further investigative journalism or a more democratic functioning of journalism, rather than there not actually being a need for guerrilla journalists in Australia.

Does Australia need a model of Ohmynews too? Am I just too unaware of what need there is for a more open media in this country?

The concept of the internet being a “laboratory for democracy” is particularly interesting. Imagine if we had enough netizen power to vote in the type of government we really wanted in Australia, just as netizens voted in a new and relatively unknown president in South Korea. We could use the power the internet has given us to a far greater extent if we were really politically inclined to do so, and if we were conscious enough about the issues we face in this country’s media.

As Fiza Fatima Asar writes (in Time to Think: Reflections on the uses and abuses of the media): “We have a great responsibility to ourselves and others to comprehend and promote the truth.” Hopefully this is something citizen journalism will do a lot more of.