Wednesday, 26 March 2008

If you can't beat them; join them!

Singer Madonna has announced that she will release her next album via mobile phones, after previously refusing to allow iTunes to release her music.

This suggests that she's beginning to understand the importance of the digital world to the success of her career, and that ideas which she previously avoided, such as allowing consumers to download her material, are actually the most affective way of making her money nowadays.

So this led me to think about the future of journalism, how digital developments are vastly affecting this industry, and what changes journalists must make in order to sustain their careers.

Mindy McAdams discusses these musings in what she refers to as the "iPod moment for newspapers", where she argues that "what happened to the music business, will happen to the news business".

She takes these ideas from Charles Arthur, who says that: "as the music industry has seen the destruction of the album ... now people just go for tracks. I think that in the same way, newspapers will find themselves driven down towards “the article” — as happens already online."

Roy Greenslade, The Guardian's online Blogger, believes that print journalism is dying as a result of new online communities, and says that print journalists need to recognise how to use this online medium to their advantage, rather than allowing it to push newspapers aside for good.

He says: "Unless traditional newspaper publishers can find a way of securing substantial online revenue streams, by attracting sufficient eyeballs for their editorial content, there is no future for them. That's the challenge."

And I agree. It seems to me that print journalists need to embrace this developing industry of online journalism, because it is happening, and it is affecting the ways in which people access their news. There is no way of preventing it, so if you can't beat them; join them!


A good example of using the online medium to its full potential can be seen on MTV's website, where a news story about "American Idol" offers much more than just the article in text format. In the middle of the text is a video, showing the TV performance that the article is referring to, and there is also a list of "related videos" and photographs.

Links within the text take users to other news stories on the website, as well as giving them the option to look at the MTV "newsroom blog", which users can become more involved in. Comments about the story are added at the end, showing that users like the idea of interactivity.

But
Robert Niles has a slightly different approach. Although he agrees that online journalism is becoming an ever influential factor, ("discussion communities, blogs, wikis and other websites are drawing readers' attention from old media information sources"), he's noticeably more positive about it than Greenslade appears to be.

Niles believes that tutors of journalism should take a more active role in teaching their students about the new ways of presenting news, but says that "teaching them how to report, write, edit and produce news stories, even in multiple media, is not enough", because students need to learn how to compete within the journalism industry.

He bases his discussion around the idea that students will be more productive if they are encouraged to write about something which they are passionate about, and to learn how to maintain that passion throughout their writing and their journalistic lives.

While this may be a good starting point, it doesn't really adhere to his concept of competition, as it's my understanding that to get my foot through the journalism door, I'm going to have to write about things that I'm certainly not passionate about, or even totally bored by, from time to time.

But I suppose that if Niles can teach his students to appreciate the sheer joy that can be obtained from journalistic writing, then hopefully they will be able to put a more interesting spin on a somewhat dull story in the future.

Only time will tell...

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