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| Image source: Google images |
Throughout this course we have discussed a number of issues that face the journalism industry today. With our rapidly changing media environment, there are the impacts of globalisation on journalism and how it affects the content of news. New technological advances in the digital age also pose a number of issues relating to the importance of the journalist, the impacts of social media and also the role of the citizen journalist.
Based on these issues, it is safe to say that journalism as we know it is in a period of significant change and redevelopment. So what does this mean for the future of the journalism industry?
At first glance, the vast majority of these issues seem overwhelmingly negative and many people believe the role of the journalist is fast becoming redundant with the takeover of technology and the Internet. After interviewing Paul Lobb for my major assignment and discussing the impacts of new technologies, I was quietly surprised to learn the positive affects it can have on the industry. Far from taking over the actual role of the journalist, new technologies assist journalists and the audience in finding news stories immediately. A recent example is the news coverage of the Chilean miners. Because of the Internet, the world was able to receive updates by the second during their rescue mission.
This magnitude of information now available to us also has people questioning whether the journalist and journalism in general is still necessary, particularly if the majority of information can now be sourced through the Internet. In a detailed commentary program called Lifelong Learning: Cultures of Journalism on ABC’s Radio National, these issues were discussed. Barbie Zelizer, from the Annenburg School of Communication at Pennsylvania University, summed up my exact feelings for the future of journalism:
“I would say that there's more information out there than we can possibly attend to, so that journalism acts as a primary filter, as an assist, as a ranking device, as a way for us to make sense of events that are far beyond our grasp. A colleague of mine, Michael Schudson, once said that if we were in a world without journalism, we would immediately invent journalists. And I think that that's precisely right. I think that it is not possible to imagine a world without journalists, so that's really the answer to the question of why journalism matters.”
Journalism is a dynamic and fluid industry that will continue to adapt to the digital age. It will never become redundant because ultimately people need and will always need it as an objective and impartial critic of society.
