Is Technology Hurting Journalism?

Baume, P. (2009, April). How technology is changing journalism. The Australian, p31, 1p. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier Database.

Patrick Baume, media analyst for Media Monitors, says that the world of media has changed more in the past 10 years than it has in any other time in history. At the turn of the century, Baume says, East Timor voted for its independence from Indonesia on August 30, 1999. The resulting torrent and conflict was seen by the world only through the eyes of the handful of media correspondents there at the time. While he says that initial reports documented the “complete breakdown of law and order,” there were no direct reports or personal accounts of the actual events which led to a lack of coverage for the first few days of the incident. At the time in 1999, there were no camera phones, no blogs, no twitters…just newspapers, radio and television sources for news. Two years later, September 11, 2001 was initially covered by professional television organizations almost exclusively for the first few hours. While radio and newspapers picked up the event very quickly and amateur footage emerged after a few days, the vast majority of coverage was only available on TV sets across the nation. Because of this relative distance from the event (helicopters and tower cameras), Baume says, there was a lack of accurate information from personal and on-the-scene accounts which only propagated the confusion. While the fine detail took longer to disseminate, media could provide a sense of scale of the attack almost immediately. The current state of technology allows an event to be broadcasted across multiple platforms almost simultaneously. Baume argues that while, “Citizen journalism and technological advances have not replaced traditional news gathering. They have in fact vastly improved the scope of information [and] sources available to journalists and the speed with which they can piece together the elements of a news story.”

Baume’s article is simply showing that the proliferation of technology in the forms of camera phones, blogs, instant updates and the occasional ‘citizen journalist’ correspondent has in fact helped the traditional forms of media. By having more sources available to a news organization quicker, the organization can now choose to include that info or not. In the case of a traumatic event, news organizations aren’t likely to be the first on the scene, but instead the people involved are. If those people have access to a camera phone or a service that can post info directly to these news outlets, then they effectively are on the scene by choosing to publish that direct info. In this case these ‘citizen journalists’ aren’t hurting the professionals by diverting traffic away from traditional news outlets to blogs because blogs aren’t the first place most people are going to for an immediate reaction to an event. Instead, the blogs and tweets will talk about the event after the fact, but the initial news has been coming from traditional outlets simply because they have begun to monitor the citizen journalist out of the fact that they can’t be everywhere all the time. Evidence of this comes from Baume himself saying that his organization alone, in 2009, has begun to monitor 5,000 traditional media outlets, 25,000 blogs, and 15,000 websites, which he says 95% of which did not exist in 1999.

Brittany: Regulations against citizen journalists

Belson, K., & Arango, T. (2009, August 19). Leagues see bloggers in the bleachers as a threat. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/sports/ncaafootball/20rights.html

In this article from “The New York Times,” Ken Belson and Tim Arango–two sports writers for the newspaper–discuss the changes to media policy for the Southeastern Conference (for collegiate sports). Belson (who has written about sports management and economics for other publications including “Newsweek” and “Reuters”) and Arango (who covers business and politics for “The New York Times”) summarize the new SEC regulations aimed at people in the stands at conference games. The policy is aimed at “prohibiting fans from distributing photographs or video of its games in real time for commercial use.” The primary fear that the SEC has is that, as technology continues to evolve and advance, fans will be able to take high-enough quality video that can be broadcast online and jeopardize the multimillion-dollar investments from media outlets such as ESPN and CBS. Some interpretations of the policy argue that any ticketed fan in the stands would be banned from updating their Facebook statuses and Twitter pages, and from adding photos to Flickr from the games. Charles Bloom, an SEC spokesman, told Belson and Arango that the SEC is not “trying to prevent fans from sending personal messages or brief descriptions of games to their Facebook pages or on Twitter . . . (because) enforcing such a policy would be impractical and counterproductive because social media platforms help promote the conference’s teams.”

The SEC has reason to be worried. Technology continues to improve drastically from year to year, and it is very likely that cell phones will soon have high-definition cameras embedded in them; combine that with the ability to live stream from a cell phone to a website, and sports fans would be able to watch games online for free–costing ESPN and CBS valuable viewership. But this policy goes beyond determining who can do what at SEC games. The policy is an attack on citizen journalists–people who blog, Facebook, Tweet, post to Flickr, et cetera. It is an attempt to protect big media while deterring “small” media. And while this specific policy only targets sports coverage–and specifically that in the SEC–the meaning behind it can be translated to all forms of traditional journalism. This is a step in the direction of banning all high-tech journalism from sporting events–and eventually all events. It’s not to say that every “fansite blogger” and owner of a Twitter account should have media access, but more and more traditional media outlets are adopting these new forms of communication. Does this mean that newspaper reporters shouldn’t be allowed to live Tweet from games? Should television reporters not be allowed to use flip cameras to shoot for the nightly news recap of games? There is still a line between what is considered “legitimate” journalism and what is considered “amateur” journalism, but policies such as the SEC policy that target citizen journalists could soon be transferred to professional journalists, too. Professional reporters now blog, Tweet, take photos and shoot video–just as amateurs have been. This policy clearly demonstrates some of the issues facing journalism today: Who is a journalist? Who gets what access? What technologies can journalists use?