CBC, Ambient Journalism?

CBC, Ambient Journalism?

On 1^st Oct, 2013, we( MAs in communication program of University of Ottawa  in a course called “New direction of journalism”) went  on a trip to CBC, which “is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster(Wikipedia)”[1] ,to get some basic knowledge of journalistic working environment, production system and daily agenda.  And as the title illustrates, this experience to CBC will be taken as a supportive example to discuss “whether the ‘ambient journalism’ is enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream journalism” in this blog.

The reading materials in the week three have mentioned the connection of 3 main elements: democracy, social media, and journalism. Natalie Fenton points out that innovative news-webs being established by citizens could never replace newsrooms that enjoy real freedom from both government and commercial-intended market, and other authors focus on how journalism and social networks are influencing each other.

It is easy to notice that the relationship between the social media and journalism has been especially analyzed and discussed. Knowing from these articles,  a new pattern of journalism—ambient journalism, where “people contribute to the creation, dissemination and discussion of news via social media services such as Twitter (Hermida 2012, p.5) ”, or as Hermida says in the reading of week three “where the journalism itself becomes fragmented and omnipresent, constructed by both journalists and audiences”[2] , Hermida, A. (2012)—is on its way.

By using UGC, blogs, message boards, sharing of recommendations and social network functionality and so on, mainstream media are aiming to tell better stories, make a better relationship with the audience and get more users. However, problems related to verification, objectivity, professional identity, public privacy issue, accountability and transparency of journalism are occurring in the process.  How, exactly, do mainstream journalism like CBC cope with such an issue? Fortunately, it could be answered partially, though not thoroughly, with the information gathered during the CBC trip and from the CBC website news.

News Gathering

As Alfred Hermida says in the article assigned, “tweeter effect” is termed by Bruno in 2011 to describe “how online tools that facilitate the publication and distribution of user-generated, real-time content are affecting how the news is reported and by whom”[3]，Hermida, A. (2012). Thus, with a great number of people reporting  news and their referrals, the way  in which  the news are gathered by mainstream journalism has been transformed. And apart from Tweeter, social media like Facebook and search engine like Google are also playing a crucial role in this transformation.

To be specific, by attending and observing the their morning meeting( including managers, reporters, journalists, editors ,producers, etc.), it is not difficult to notice that there are diverse sources of news are now being used: newspapers reports, news reported by other TV stations, Google recommended news, personal experience, and social media such as  Facebook feeds and tweets are newcomers. Only one person brought newspapers there, and about one-fourth of the meeting time was used to discover Facebook feeds which they thought may be of value and could appeal to an audience, but doubts as “but, you know, it may not be true” are always followed, which are mentioned either seriously or playfully. For example, there was a Facebook feed referred thousands of times calling on people to find a girl who had disappeared and cannot be contacted for as long as one week, the reality of this piece of  news had been doubted right after it was retold by someone in this meeting.

FIGURE 1: The usefulness of social media for different purposes: the proportion of all journalists who regard a specific form of usage as at least somewhat important (%). The full sample of journalists is included: N = 1412 (including those who do not use social media). Adapted from “The Social Journalist: Embracing the social media life or creating a new digital divide? ,” by U. Hedman and M. Djerf-Pierre, 2013, Digital Journalism, Published online: 07 Mar 2013. 【4】

As to Twitter and Facebook, they are described as “the ‘kings’ in the realm of social media in the newsrooms”  by Garcí a de Torres et al. (2011) in their analysis of 27 Iberian and South American news outlets.  And it is clearly illustrated in this bar chart that the journalists are taking the advantage of social media more by viewing it as a source of newsgathering rather than depending on the so-called “crowdsourcing” and thus, the path of the ideal “pro-am journalism” is rough—the participation of the citizens and the interaction and co-creation between the professional journalists and amateurs is not as positive as the public desires.

Verification—Priority

-Double Check

To make sure whether to report the feeds on social media like Facebook or not, they decided to write them down first and then go and “double-check” it to confirm their certainty. And this seems to be the main responsibility and a priority in the CBC news production. “New information needs to be corroborated by a second source…We are constantly evolving our journalistic standards and practices and have mandated our new director of journalistic accountability to propose changes that would address these issues. Our reputation depends on it”[5], said by Jennifer McGuire, the general manager and editor in chief of CBC, when writing about the importance of their journalistic verification on her blog.

In one of  her blogs—Covering the Ottawa Train-Bus Crash, she confirmed this point of view again when talking about the release of the bus driver’s name: “By 11 am, we learned from a reliable source the full name of the bus driver…We then double confirmed this, with two other reliable sources…in the sensitive case of a death, we almost always hold back”[6].

-Accuracy > Speed

With the advent of social media and its flourish, what Jennifer McGuire has in mind is coherent with Newman’s opinion: “news organizations are already abandoning attempts to be first for breaking news, focusing instead on being the best at verifying and curating it.” [7]Rather than racing with the pace of the development of the social reports, mainstream journalism (CBC in this blog) is switching their role(not totally) into a curator of news production to navigate, sift and check the vast amounts of data on social media streams while producing its own news in traditional way. Thus, the nature of breaking news is being changed. A journalist of CBC emphasized this concept during our trip there and said that it is the accuracy of the news which could give rise to their authority that keeps CBC different from or even superior to the other media. This could be seen from a story discussed on their morning meeting as well:  Journalists there have been zooming and verifying the accuracy of a certain case for weeks instead of concentrating on how fast it could be reported to the public.

Also there is a report published by Ryerson University–How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy[8]，Ivor Shapiro, Colette Brin, Isabelle Bédard-Brûlé & Kasia Mychajlowycz（2013）—in which 28 newspapers in Canada have been studied and it is worth noting that all of them are continuing to make verification of facts a priority, which is a very amazing result and could serve well as this subtitle as print journalism is heading in the same direction with TV stations such as CBC while the social media journalism is booming.

New Reporting

Not only by broadcasting or writing print reports, journalists are now also able to report on blogs and microblogs, which is more popular than the former right now. And CBC is linking the content of the tweets of their journalists to their online news page now (Pic1).

Pic 1: Alberta school bus crash leaves boy, 5, in critical condition, Oct 25, 2013, 11:39 AM MT,

This is an article reporting an Alberta school bus crash happened on 25th, Oct 2013. We could see from the first screenshot that before writing this news article, the journalist Jen Lee kept tweeting about the ongoing situation of the school bus crash which came into a real-time/ live journalistic reporting(Live coverage). And some tweets of other CBC journalists covering this accident were shown a day after( as the second screenshot shows). The live microblogs function well in being the first( though not that urgent—the content of the tweets turn out to be more than verified to some extent, though may not the as reliable as the formal ones) , nonetheless, such tweets shown on the news pages among most coverages of CBC website are mostly reported by their own or appointed journalists or correspondents rather than a combination between unverified citizen tweets and authenticated professional reports. Fortunately, it is gratifying to find that, some citizen witness is included and reported as a part of the coverage on the second day, as is shown in the following screenshot. Therefore, what could be summed up is that CBC is continuing its traditional reporting pattern in the digital age, though with some slight evidence to involve the citizens in the news report. Maybe it is trying to form the pro-am journalism, but, I would rather say, with a conservative effort.

Additionally, when covering the train-bus crash in Ottawa, CBC used its own organizational norms and ethics—picking up pictures uploaded by citizens with Twitter in terms of their own value, rewrote citizens’ content of tweets instead of quoting( did not find any related quotes in any coverage of this crisis), and when questioned by audience through Twitter that CBC “has overstepped the bounds of decency by airing a conversation with Ms. Woodard the day after her husband had died”, the CBC ignored it and continued the coverage and even called for the understanding of the audience instead of apologise or detailed explanations by saying “while we appreciate and respect the many differing comments and opinions we invite from our audiences, we also feel it’s important to help people understand why and how we made some of the decisions we did.”—which indicates, as Hermida says, “a relatively closed professional culture for the production of knowledge, based on a system of editorial control”—“ Journalists are beginning to embrace social media tools like Twitter, Blogs, and Facebook, but very much on their own terms[9]”.

Conclusion

At present, journalists in the mainstream media, CBC particularly in this blog, is having more access to diverse news sources with the appearance and development of the social media. However, it cannot be ignored that coming with the diversity are more and more false or faked reports, videos, images, etc. Therefore, while being a producer, CBC is also acting as a curator to keep an eye on news reported on social media, then selected and reproduced to make sure of the accuracy of the reports which is seen as the priority of current journalism by double or even triple checking them.  Besides, instead of using the citizen reports directly, professional journalists prefer to re-report the issues in their own term which is not accorded with the ideal characteristics of current journalism—positively interactive and participative.

In short, “ Journalists are normalizing social media rather than adapting their occupational culture” to what Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton describe as “a new media format that directly challenges them”.

 

REFERENCES

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation

[2] Hermida, A. (2012). “Chapter 17: Social Journalism: Exploring how Social Media is Shaping Journalism”. In The Handbook of Global Online Journalism. Eds. Eugenia Siapera & Andreas Veglis. Wilely. Pp.

[3] Newman, Nic. (2009). “Rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism:” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Oxford.

[4] http://hujo.deri.ie/skeptics-conformists-and-activists-how-and-why-journalists-use-social-media/

[5] http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/community/editorsblog/2013/05/verification-why-getting-it-right-trumps-getting-it-first.html

[6] http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/community/editorsblog/2013/09/covering-the-ottawa-train-bus-crash.html

[7] Newman, Nic. (2009). “Rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism:” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Oxford.

[8] Verification as a Strategic Ritual—How journalists retrospectively describe processes for ensuring accuracy, Ivor Shapiro, Colette Brin, Isabelle Bédard-Brûlé & Kasia Mychajlowycz, pages 657-673, Published online: 05 Feb 2013

 

Ottawa Citizen and the Future of Local Print Journalism

“Journalism industry is in crisis[1]”, Pickard argues when he talks about the current status of journalism, and “especially at local level[2]”. Acting exactly as such a local newspaper, Ottawa citizen, an English-language daily newspaper owned by Postmedia Network in Ottawa, Canada, is struggling to survive and even develop if possible. In this blog, the content strategies, a special type of journalism being attached importance on—data journalism, the business model and the future of Ottawa Citizen will be discussed, with my latest and first experience to Ottawa Citizen on 30^th Oct and relative idea mentioned in the Week 7 reading materials.

A declining trend of newsroom workforce in 12 companies is illustrated by the line chart above—2013 Pew’s “State of the media report”. However, Robert McChesney said that instead of saying farewell to print journalism—though there are declines which cannot be ignored, and it is asserted that “by all accounts, the industry remains in free fall”—people should realize that journalism is not dying and it may never die. Also, the appearance of digital age would give rise to a chance for journalism and the public to figure out a way to help it live longer and more dynamically. Ottawa Citizen could serve as a good example of it.

Carl Neustaedter, the deputy editor of Citizen, said that, the same as other traditional print journalism, Citizen is vulnerable to the longtime business journalism—its ownership has changed 4 times since it was established. And in 2007, the number of journalists in Ottawa citizen was reduced from 135 to 85, that is, 50 people were fired including 2 great reporters, while it is good to know that 140 more staff were hired to construct a 170-member team in its Hamilton branch that year, indicating that it was trying to keep journalists as a core point in its development by not losing so many journalists in total. After the 2008 global financial crisis, what’s more, the majority of Citizen’s journalists (99%) worked in Hamilton, with only 1% left in Ottawa, Ontario.

Facing this big change of working environment, new content strategies were brought out to try to adapt to it effectively and efficiently.

Hyperlocal Journalism

Firstly, the “hyperlocal coverage”, defined as “news reporting that more closely reflects the everyday lives of residents in a particular community”[3], which “appears to hold at least the potential for developing a sustainable model”[4], is Ottawa Citizen’s key reporting model. The hyperlocal coverage of Citizen covered both news in old Ottawa (suburbs) and the downtown, consisting “a company town”, Carl said, which fitted the local nature of the newspaper well but was not a 100% free “town”—easily influenced and even controlled by revenue status, owner’s opinions and the government because of its dependence on traditional business model and official accounts. And it corresponds to the opinion suggested by Barnhurst, K. that there is “a turn toward nearby places”[5].

Three Content Areas

Secondly, there are 3 main parts of content in Citizen’s reports: political and public service, traditional news and life news. From which we can see that, by keeping pace with the trend of “long journalism” mentioned by Kevin, the “political content is among the most important in journalism[6]”, and its reliance on official accounts is considerable, concluded as the “weakness of professional code”. This point of view is confirmed by Andrew Potter, Citizen’s Managing Editor, seeing the “free press”—who “has the right to speak without government censorship”[7] and could achieve and satisfy the literate public, construct viable press system and give easy access to the press by people—is “romantic thoughts”, though they have been trying to figure out how to maintain neutral, balance between official accounts and the voice of citizens as well as the exact principle of fair news reporting. However, the weakness “also has its virtue, not the least of public life”, as we could see that public service is still a part, though may not be the most important one, of the reporting arrangement.

Content sections of Ottawa Citizen

And another point worth noting is that soft news—news covering entertainment, celebrity, gossip, crime, and lifestyle journalism—is a new comer and is gradually being a favourite of the news industry. In Citizen’s coverage, said by potter that the existence of sections such as travel and home are of great value to attract related advertising investment, and delivering audience to these sections could earn itself considerable profit. And thus, this model is viewed to be “bread and butter” to Ottawa Citizen. That being said, it has also developed into side sites, which concentrate on contemporary and soft news only, with subscribing purpose instead of pursuing journalistic value or public good (such as “Citizen Cycling”, “Flyer City” and “Shopping” section, pictures below).

Four Platforms

Print & Website

To get adjust to the thriving digital era to “take advantage of the technology and make reading news a habit to people instead of controlled of depressed by it”, Potter said, Ottawa Citizen has developed into four platforms: redesigned traditional newspaper productions, redesigned website, new mobile app and tablet, responding “the migration of audience to digital forms”[8]. In general accord with what Kevin said about the “differences among topics aligned with journalistic practice” in “News experiment online: story content after a decade on the web”, the news content is various among these four platforms. Print productions are richer in reporting news in Ottawa and different moves that are going on, with its website reporting more omnivorous news with videos as supplements ( sometimes).

Mobile APP & Tablet

Talking about the last two, “some digital business analysts see mobile largely supplanting desktop/laptop consumption of news within two or three years…[and] newspapers have responded, as they more or less must, by making their content available in mobile formats ( 2013 Pew Research) ”,so does Ottawa Citizen, who is intending to develop a mobile app to build a platform similar to Twitter for the public to major in reporting hyperlocal news which is shorter than their counterparts online and print ones. And the tablet, which is being considered to have “a potential for brand-building advertising on the devices”, is developed by Citizen to act as a daily magazine. It is said by Potter that “what people prefer to read, how long do they take to read and how do they arrange their engagement in reading the newspaper” (through which platform or through Twitter/Facebook) could be known by journalists in Ottawa Citizen by technological methods, thus making it possible for them to act as a curator of news and get better understanding of people’s preferences. For example, by analysing data of usage of tablets, the journalists could get the knowledge that more people are using their tablets to read in the evening, which enables them to do something with it to manage the tablet platform better.

The Ottawa Citizen is “intending to champion each platform with their colleagues in Toronto”, could they? Let us wait and see.

Social Network

Melaine Coulson, the Senior Editor of Ottawa Citizen Website, discussed with us about their current online journalism, which is taking advantage of the social networks. She begins to work every morning at 7:30 pm and post news at “hot traffic time”—from 8:00 am-9:00 am, at noon and so on—when people are waking up, eating or taking buses and turning to news reports. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook are main sources. And Citizen targets and communicates with the audience by tweeting news and tweeting back to people, instead of “roboting” reports, to make more conversations and gain more news as well. With such a progress going on, “wrong reports” could be made, and “what [the Citizen editors] should do is be a normal person to apologize and correct them”, Coulson said, “and speaking of the ‘double check’ performed by journalists, we should see it critically as well…diversity confirming sources do not necessarily confirm the truth of the news because they could be derived from one original source which may turn out to be false or fake.” Added by her that “And journalists are always considered to represent their newspapers no matter they are tweeting with personal account or the official ones”. Therefore we could see the social networking of Ottawa Citizen is flexible and interactive.

Data journalism

And here, just a quick glance at the Data journalism—introduced by Glen Mcgregor, Ottawa Citizen’s reporter—which could represent “an overlapping set of competencies drawn from disparate fields”[9].And Glen calls it “data assisted report” reporting public voice. He is one of the pioneers of such journalism and has published several highly popular news reports till now, such as “The ticket master”, which talked about the person who tickets people most in Ottawa; and “Bikes snatched off streets”, which informed people about the places where bikes are more easily snatched , etc. From these information we can see that data journalism is mostly used by newspaper with explicit charts or tables—Ottawa Citizen in this case—to report news which are close to people’s life and therefore to earn more popularity once they are published. Thus, maybe it would help newspapers maintain or attract audience, but I cannot say it for sure because of the lack of relative investigations.

The Future of Print—A Combination

The paywall and business model of Ottawa Citizen have not been talked about much, but as mentioned above, they are viewing soft news as a source to attract advertising and considering it as a bread-and-butter thing. Additionally, by a brief introduction of the newspaper’s paywall and their unwillingness to drop it, we could say, from a shallow point of view of the Citizen’s business model, some newspapers now are still relying on the “inadequate and outdated business models”[10] by seeing ads as a source of revenue which, as Siles, I. and Boczkowski, P. said in “Making sense of the newspaper crisis: A critical assessment of existing research and an agenda for future work”, may lead to a newspaper crisis. And newspaper paywalls may be a way to gain profits.

Speaking of the tendency of content of the future print journalism, local newspapers are becoming more intended to report nearby news and, with the political news maintaining important in their news reporting, the number of soft news may keep increasing and become more and more, even not as important as the political ones. Side sites which focus only on soft news with subscribing purpose may become a new way for journalism to make profits. Technology would be more embraced by print journalism to establish different platforms to meet different needs of audience and to take advantage of communications with users on social media. Finally, data journalism may also assist print journalism to appeal to more audience to enhance their influence, and gain profits if possible.

References

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[1] Pickard V (2011) Can government support the press? Historicizing and internationalizing a policy approach to the journalism crisis. Communication Review 14(2): 73–95.

[2] McChesney, R. (2013). “Chapter 6: Journalism is Dead! Long live journalism?”. Digital Disconnect: The New Press. pp, 172-215.

[3] Kaye J and Quinn S (2010) Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. New York: Peter Lang.

[4] Kurpius DD, Metzgar ET, and Rowley KM (2010) Sustaining hyperlocal media: in search of funding models. Journalism Studies 11(3): 359–376.

[5] Barnhurst, K. (2013). “Newspapers experiment online: Story content after a decade on the web”, Journalism, 14(1) 3–21.

[6] Barnhurst, K. (2013). “Newspapers experiment online: Story content after a decade on the web”, Journalism, 14(1) 3–21.

[7] Robert McChesney , “Journalism is dead! Long live journalism? ”, Digital Disconnect, The New Press

[8] PEW. (2013).Newspapers. State of the Media Report. Available from:

http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/newspapers-stabilizing-but-still-threatened/

[9]  Michelle Minkoff (24 March 2010). “Bringing data journalism into curricula”.

[10] Siles, I. and Boczkowski, P. (2012). “Making sense of the newspaper crisis: A critical assessment of existing research and an agenda for future work”, New Media & Society, 14(8) 1375–1394

The Future of Journalism–A Multi-Mutual-Journalistic Network

With the emergence of internet and several economic depressions, people, especially scholars and journalists, are concerned that journalism will be mired in a deep crisis. It is understandable when more advertising investment and readers are becoming inclined to the less expensive web and sweeping layoffs of journalists are shown to the public. An American website “Newspaper Death Watch” have been recording the names of important dailies which declare their closures or choose to move their public platform to internet since it was established in 2007, and these recorded names have now formed a long list of “epitaph” .Nevertheless, I consider the future of journalism to be positive.

Rather than a substitute, internet is a partner with the traditional journalism which could fuel it to blossom more vigorously in the new digital era. What’s more, it could bring out revenue-gaining methods with which journalism can survive and even flourish.

To be more explicit, I will talk about the future of journalism from the following aspects:

1. Multi

Presentation（Format& Platform）：

The media industry is led by, in current society, a digital technology framework made up of remote media companies, computer manufacturers and application developers. In such a fusion, mode of transmission is no longer a single, but a multi-channel one. That is, combined with electronic (technological) operation, the traditional journalism is under self-reconstruction to establish a multimedia news structure, which will, accordingly, create a more participatory journalism and contribute to a more advanced connection with new media.

In addition to paper-based news, radios, televisions, mobile phones, computers or tablets can spread news on their own at present, even simultaneously. Besides, they are widely welcomed. A study of Pew Research Center indicated that the ratio of U.S. computer users who often use their desktops or laptops to read news is as high as 70%, the percentage of news readers who read news with mobile phones and tablets are considerable as well, accounting for 51 % and 56 %, respectively.

Meanwhile, inside the cyberspace, attached by a hyperlink or composed in the same page, online news (articles, radios and videos) will show audience an enjoyable and colorful form of communication so as to achieve a three-dimensional propagation. Thus, the audience’s need of pleasure will be met by the diversity of such an interesting media. “New York Times”, for example, has spent great efforts to transform the original news production, set up a team to do a lot of tests with “Data News”, “Interactive close-up “, ” Crowd-sourcing News” , etc. For now, it has achieved initial success.

Profit-pursuit ways：

(1) Business

As mentioned above，the structure of multimedia is born from the needs that media should make proper and considerable connection with the society. To strengthen this framework, many companies choose to operate a number of functional departments, or purchase small companies with expertise which are specialized in specific media fields, thereby to carry out integrations and internal operations. This is a convergence and has been seriously considered and tried for long time. “Since early 1990s, many news corporations have undergone simultaneous processes of horizontal and vertical development.” demonstrated by Eds. Eugenia Siapera & Andreas Veglis. Wiley. In “The handbook of global online journalism”. With such a gradual and positive process going on, news gathering, producing and distributing will no longer be separate parts in media pressing process, on the contrary, they will be crossed or combined with each other (chart 1).

Chart 1

Operated in a multimedia company, media process will cost less and the efficiency of media will improve as well. Consequently, the content and quality of news will be well guaranteed. (Content Convergence)

(2) Revenue

There are a large number of closures of traditional media being announced nowadays because of their lack of revenue and, no better than which, there are considerable media companies who pursuit profit so much that the value of journalism has been despised and ignored. Hence, it is time to rescue these desperate media and the advent of digital era could be conducive to these traditional media.

Journalism, in present world, is called on to be a real-time enterprise which is diverse (Possessing integrated, classified and characteristic websites; owning practitioners of different functional properties), comprehensive (a feature which counts very much to help broaden the range of audience) and low-cost. These three characteristics are key to the journalism market by reason that it has initial appeal to the advertising industry. That is, could the traditional journalism utilize the digital technology in current context as much as possible (rather than ignore or even worse, I mean, against it), the innovation of technology will absolutely lead journalism to a brighter future.

A study of HP Laboratory shows that among the top 22 twitter editors whose news had been forwarded most, 16 of them were from traditional media like CNN, New York Times and ESPN–Traditional media turns out to have an important position on the platform of online social media. Thus, it is of good use to rich platforms and formats for journalism and thereby to attract increasingly number of ads—and benefit at last (such as developing Mobile Apps, establishing mobile websites, opening home pages on social media like Facebook and so on so forth).

Additionally, building its own online newspaper/website to pursue an independent publishing position and charge audience for the online digital contents is another method that journalism could turn to. Once adopted, old journalism could not only be no more monotonous, but benefit itself as well. As a consequence, the quality of journalistic articles will be guaranteed since the audience will pay more attention to the content /value of the published news to make sure that it is deserve the money paid.

For instance, Walter Isaacson, the former chief editor of “Times”, has advocated a mode called”Micro-payment”: Readers should pay 1 cent per article, 10 cents for one-day’s articles and 2 dollars for all the articles every month. Besides, Gans has once suggested that online news products of newspaper should be managed with a hierarchical way, by which he means that online newspapers could charge those professional people who are eager to get more special and occupational news.

Also, the online media could charge the websites /search engines like Google–which have gained much revenue and got huge traffic by collecting secondhand information–for money. This has already been done by AP (Associated Press), who urged Google to pay for its original news and then published a report about it. At this time, advertisement will then be the icing on the cake rather than a life saver, the loyalty of audience and their seriousness during the reading process will require and appeal to ads of high quality, too.

Overall, internet is playing a vital role on the positive development of journalism if journalistic industry could spare no efforts to adapt to the digital age and take great advantage of it. (Technological & Business Convergence)

2. Mutual–Journalistic Activities

Interactive Process

(1) Social Media

Keeping pace with the constantly developing technology, social media start to appear, self-improve and, gradually, flourish-e.g. “We Media”-and bring deep reforms of journalistic content, formats, instructive mechanism and regulative mechanism to traditional media. Some universities in the U.S have already opened “Twitter” courses to students in schools of journalism. And a case in point is that, Twitter, a production of social media, was the only platform on which first source of journalistic reports were provided in the case of Iran War, 2009. And what is worth noticing is that, at that time, citizens were the ones who told us what was happening and then participated in a hot discussion (there were more than 480,000 comments on Twitter just within the first 2 weeks) instead of professional journalists, which gives us a hint that the professional journalism is transforming into general public journalistic activities—audience is becoming users and acting as an armature journalists at times through social media. (Professional Convergence)

Social media has made it possible for the public to send reports and news instantly, expressing their emotion, describing incidents and making comments. Thus giving rise to a relatively free publish platform—upon which journalistic activities constitute and journalists will no longer be the manipulator of the current journalism. What these journalists could do is communicate with the public, search for social news, confirm the truth of the incidents, revise the articles and publish them. In such a process, with the involvement of common people, news publishing will be more people-friendly and popular which will accordingly draw more public attention and profitable investment.

After all, it is better to name professional journalism as journalistic activities. Media should end the media-centrism age and begin a mega-media era—-a brand new interactive and communicative platform. And mutual–journalistic activities will be born.

(2) Network

Speed—Depth

Considering all the possibilities and steps discussed above, the journalism could produce itself a journalistic network, which could stimulate both publishing speed and depth.

It could be described as a news production sequence made up with five procedures: Instant public participation; online drafting; Idea exchange; Update and Revise; complete and publish.

Specifically, news could be published via social media instantly with mobile devices; then written more in detail as an informal report form stating opinions (such as blogs); Technological operation should be done afterward to ensure the accuracy of events (e.g. confirming the accurate location of the news publisher) to help journalists undertake professional analysis and publish the news officially back to the public at last.

Conclusion

To sum up, it is, in my opinion, of great possibility that the journalism will transform from a single, monotonous, self-centered and absolute professional industry into a multi-mutual-journalistic network, a promising future.