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.
Shiyu Zhuang 