New world order

Media as an industry is growing in size, in effectivity and competitivness everyday. From newspapers, to radio, to television, the internet, now online newspapers, blogging, digital television and mobile phone technology, it seems that the media industry is not and should not stop innovating the way we receive news and information on the world anytime soon.

As I discussed in a previous blog journalism and particulary newspapers have been affected immensly by the conception of internet news and advertising. Most papers now have corresponding websites featuring news blogs, interactive surveys, picture galleries, video and audio. It seems that the old image of people reading the paper at breakfast before work is now people checking their iphones for news bulletins.

Something that i think is important when considering how personalised we can make our online news reading is that if we continue to only receive news that interests us, we will end up with a population with limited knowledge of issues outside their niche market of interests. This is why i think that broader news options like the newspaper and television news to some extent will always be popular. The main reason being that we can generally rely on them as a credible news source which covers a large range of issues. It is a responsibility i think of the media to keep people informed and to keep big business and politics in check, although we may not always be able to rely on some press to do so it is important to me that we can use the media as a tool for democracy and that in the future we will have mastered the art of all new forms of media to create a much more effective and respectable way of reporting the news and to provide advertising.

Something like a phenomenon...

Blogging has come to be one of the major expressions of our lives, opinions, news and interests online. However, blogs have revolutionised one profession in particular. Journalism has never been more interactive than it has become over the last few years. With the introduction of online news bulletins and news blogs, the average journo whether on TV or writing for a paper will have a corresponding blog.

Almost all major newspapers now have an online version of themselves and “from 2004 to 2005, the number of online newspapers that hosted blogs nearly doubled (Lowrey & Mackay, 2006). Many journalists have their own blogs, which emphasize local issues. Some journalist blogs are more opinionated that others, but regardless of how they are worded, they often provide readers a more personal account of the news (Singer 2005).” (Mackay, Wilson 2008)

From professional blogs has come citizen journalism where anyone who had access to the internet donned a press hat and people were reporting on the political situation in their country where they could not rely on the media to do so. Citizen journalists form Uganda and Afghanistan have been some of the most radical and revealing communicating with the world from war zones. “Uganda has had blogs for some years now (over 200) on various topics raging from day-to-day life to sports, political commentary, religion and technology. During the Mabira Forest give-away chaos, a young Ugandan with offices in the city centre was posting updates every hour of what he saw from his window” (New Vision 2008) and during the post election violence in Nairobi, the conventional media focussed on the fighting in the streets and villages, bloggers told us about the silent homes, supermarkets, kiosks and bars.

References

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/3/2/6/p173266_index.html

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/459/651502