Evolving Technology and Its Journalistic Repercussions
By: Connor O’Rourke
March 15, 2012
SANTA CLARA – An explosion of technology has led to the necessary redesigning of many news organizations on how they present the news to the public. Online news organizations like the Huffington Post, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have changed the game of information sharing. Offering up-to-the-second breaking news, they present the reader speed and accuracy never before achievable. Traditional news organizations are doing everything they can to stay relevant.
The San Jose Mercury News has adopted a few new techniques to keep up with this new digital revolution. It is becoming more difficult for journalists to adapt to new technology. The Mercury still does things similar to the way they have for years, with field journalists reporting on stories which then are revised by a room of editors before the final cut.
Mercury News Slideshow
The people at the Mercury would laugh and mention the phrase “a lot of teaching old dogs new tricks” when referring to their newsroom. In last few years Journalists have had to completely redesign the way they work. Now, the majority of readers are getting their information from online news sites or apps, so it’s essential to incorporate these mediums in todays newsroom. View the Slideshow of the Mercury News by clicking on the picture to the right.
With everyone doing their best to avoid getting left in the dust, there are some who can do little to keep up. Doug Griswald has been the in house illustrator for the Mercury for many years, and he has become a master of his craft. Griswald said that if the industry updates the software standard one more time it will force him into retirement. The shift to online media is for user convenience, but it destroying traditional organizations in the process. Space online is only about 1/10th as profitable as advertisement space is in print. That means less money to pay employees and less money to re-invest into the company. The end result is a loss of jobs due to absorption of organizations in to one another.
Organizations like The San Francisco Chronicle have taken a different approach. The Chronicle has created a fully operational sister organization for online media content called SF Gate. I had a chance to sit down with editor Vlae Kershner (left), to talk about how journalism is progressing. When asked where he thought news media was heading he said, “I think digital news is replacing print news at a fairly rapid pace. And I think that everybody is kind of aware of that. To answer, ‘how long will newspapers last in print form?’ I don’t know, maybe forever in some form. But the dominant medium is certainly becoming online, even for newspapers. That’s where most of the readers are moving.” Hear the full interview by clicking on the picture to the left of this paragraph.
Technology is beginning to split us into groups based on our personal interests. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other information giants, all monitor key strokes, and information entered into their search engines to better understand who we are as users. In turn they can assign more information to us than just an IP address. This allows for more profitable marketing and advertisements and allow for the most relevant search results to appear at the top of the page.
There are certain news companies that thrive on this segmentation of interest. Unlike traditional news organization, companies like Patch.com have focused on bringing hyper local news to its readers. I spoke with Brad Kava, editor of the Santa Cruz Patch division about what how Patch is thriving today.
Kava said that they only run stories about local news. “We would never run a story about Congress or national business,” he says, unless a local story dealt with something on a national level. “Take the Obama Jobs Plan for example, normally that wouldn’t be something we would cover on Patch. However, we had a local business, Penny’s Ice Creamery, that got a lot of help from this plan, and was actually mentioned in the State of the Union.” When I asked him what Patch was doing to stay ahead of the digital curve, he laughed and said, “We like to think we’re the front runner at the head of the curve.” ‘How do you manage to do that?’ I asked. “We pride ourselves on the amount of citizen journalism we incorporate. Everyone is out there recording videos on their iPhones and then sending us what they get. We use these people like primary sources, if you’re there, and have a first hand account, why would we NOT use that?”
Digital news organizations use online information forums and citizen journalism all the time to gather the most up to date stories. While Kava has yet to encounter legitimacy problems when it comes to citizen journalism, it is always on his mind. This is constantly an issue when utilizing information gathered from sources with no credibility. Organizations have filters and monitors in place to catch misinformation, yet the threat constantly exists. But these are the necessary risks they have to take to stay ahead of our constantly evolving digital society.
