28 May Has there been a shift from ‘fortress’ to ‘networked’ journalism? – Ellie Phillips
This essay will address the contrasts between fortress and networked journalism. Looking at how the advancement of technology has lead to advantages and disadvantages for the relationship between journalists, their sources and audience. It will argue that even with the new addition of the Internet, there is still a need for some of the basic techniques required by journalists. The need for these basic skills like writing and communication is high as without them we would not be able to get our get our stories across effectively.
Network journalism uses the Internet on different platforms such as emails, laptops and smartphones to gather as well as create and display news. This is allows the public to actively participate in journalism, for example user-generated content. Fortress journalism, on the other hand, uses very little technology and is old fashioned in the way of journalists presenting their news. As they would’ve only displayed it as newspapers, magazines, TV or radio programmes.
The increasing technological advances such as computers and smart phones in the 21st century have allowed programmers to move into newsroom as well as allowing professional journalists to develop skills with programming in order to add to their journalistic skill set.
According to Coddington (2015) “… as more programmers have begun to move into professional newsrooms and professional journalists have become increasingly drawn to programming’s technical capabilities and cultural norms, which have been heavily influenced by the open-source movement.”
In spite of the fact that basic skills are needed, this shows that the skill set required by journalists have changed as now it is more common for them to have more technology based skills in order to present their information to a wider more Internet-friendly audience.
As well as gaining more skills to be able to create better stories, journalists have had to change their approach to news as well as how to cover it over the recent years. This is because more and more people use the Internet to find and read about the news . With this increase one of these factor that have risen are user generated content.
Bregtje et all (2012) explains that, “User-generated content refers to photographs, video, textual comment, and other material provided to a news organization or news website by members of the public.”
Where user-generated content can be a benefit to journalists is that they will have access to a range of different views from a wide range of people that are passion about a topic. As well as allowing them to be able to see what the public wish to see in the news and wish to hear about.
Although this may be true, with more and more people being able to upload their own pieces of ‘journalism’ it becomes difficult to differentiate between what is accurate and what is purely someone’s opinion or feelings on a matter. This raises the issue of fake news. Leading to a many people misunderstanding a story or believing something that is not true at all because they just assume something posted online is correct when it is not.
Davies (2009) argued that “..much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest.”
This is normally where people in journalism use ‘gate-keepers’ to filter out the true stories from the made up ones. But with the increase in the amount of people using the Internet it becomes difficult to filter out everything that is incorrect.
Beckett (2010) stated that “If the public is participating then how do you prevent bias, subjectivity or unrepresentative content?”
There could be something put in place in the way of a policy to prevent people from moderating stories. However, as an online presence is expanded in the future years this might be proven difficult as the Internet will become more complex and vast.
In an age where technology seems to be taking over, we still need a few basic skills in order to be able to tell a story so that the audience will be able to understand. A main skill that is needed for a journalist is a basic one – writing. This is because if they cannot write well then they will not be able to communicate well on the subject they are trying to tell their readers. Making it a lot more difficult for the reader to engage with their piece of journalism.
Williams (2015) said that “According to Albert Mehrabian, the estimated impact of non verbal communication on the meaning of a message can be as high as 93%.”
The importance we place upon communication within journalism is high as this makes the news we take in much more understandable to people who may not truly understand the topic.
Integration of technology into newsrooms has risen in recent years this means that different skills are required as part of the journalistic process. This would include being able to collect and gather data that could back up stories.
Van Dalen (2019) stated that “…this new technology forces journalists to re-examine their own skills. In their response to these technological developments, journalists define their profession by the tasks that are fulfilled rather than the persons who possess the skills and knowledge to fulfil them.”
This suggests that even though skills are required to be a good journalists, this may not always be the case as how well you complete the task is much more important.
In the final analysis, journalism and the techniques that are required have developed greatly in recent years mainly due to the technological advances that have occurred in the 21st century. These can sometimes hinder the journalistic process as it can cause inaccuracy if journalists do not fact check information that they get from their online sources. As this can cause people to lose faith in what journalists are saying if they are constantly getting their information incorrect. However, even though there are a lot of negatives that occur because of the internet, it can also help to connect people to the stories making them more relatable which would increase the audience’s engagement with the news.
References:
Books:
Beckett, C. (2008). Supermedia Malden, MA: Wiley.
Beckett, C. (2010). The value of networked journalism.
Bregtje Van Der Haak, Castells, Manual, Michael Parks International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), Feature 2923–2938 The Future of Journalism: Networked Journalism
Mark Coddington (2015) Clarifying Journalism’s Quantitative Turn, Digital Journalism, 3:3, 331-348.
Davies, N and Crossley, S. (2009). Flat Earth News [Place of publication not identified]: Clipper.
Holmes, T., Hadwin, S. and Mottershead, G. (2013). The 21st century journalism handbook. Harlow: Pearson.
Ebook/PDF:
Spilsbury, M. (2014). Emerging skills for journalists.
Websites:
The Media Briefing. (2019) The underlying skills of 21st century journalism – The Media Briefing.
[online] Available at https://www.themediabriefing.com/analysis/the-underlying-skills-of-21st-century-journalism/ [Accessed 15 May 2019].
Van Dalen, A. (2019). THE ALGORITHMS BEHIND THE HEADLINES. [online] Taylor & Francis. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2012.667268 [Accessed 16 May 2019].
Williams, B. (2015). The art of communication. [online] medium. Available at: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-journalism/the-art-of-communication-67dfb72eccf2 [Accessed 17 May 2019]
