Blogging, Twitter, social bookmarking, Mento, Flickr. The message for today’s journalist: ignore at your peril.
As we now know blogging isn’t simply done by frustrated film fans wanting to unload their grievances with the latest Star Wars sequel. Users of Twitter aren’t just procrastinating web geeks bored of Facebook. In reality blogging is a fundamental facet of modern journalism and modern communication, while Twitter has been used by journalists in danger to alert their community of serious predicaments they find themselves in. The contemporary journalist must keep up or be cast by the wayside.
These Internet services are proof of not just the growing awareness journalists must have of the online sphere, but also how interactivity and collaboration between the journalists and the public plays a more vital role than ever before. This direct engagement, interaction and collaboration is not just exciting, but transforming the news climate with citizen journalism blurring long-standing media boundaries. This is just one other aspect of change that is happening on a vast scale at an alarming rate.
Glyn Mottershead opened his first online journalism lecture telling us how the industry is in flux. Unquestionably it always has been, but it appears that these changes are happening faster than ever. You only need to consider some of the recent developments within online news to appreciate this.
One central example is that online news sites are now awash with media as journalists are now expected to be multimedia skilled professionals. The BBC online news site now bursts with video content including a combination of exclusive online footage and excerpts from TV and radio BBC news content.
This recent revolutionising and revamping of the UK’s most dominant online news player is an indication of the wider changes taking place globally to online news. The Guardian has a tab and whole section of their online website dedicated to video and you only have to enter the Sky News homepage to see video and moving images fill the screen. A recent study reflects this growing interest and popularity of video content online and also the BBC’s dominance in the online news category.
Not only has video become so vital online, but also the aspect of live video streaming is becoming increasingly newsworthy and popular. To coincide with the coverage of rolling 24-hour news stations, news companies, such as Sky News and BBC now have exclusive live content streamed online. Just take a recent example from the BBC news website that demonstrates the significance of exclusive live streaming. This week a lion kill was filmed part of the programme ‘Big Cats’ and was streamed live to web. News or not, this later became the most watched video of the day of the BBC news site.
So today’s journalist must be a blogging, twittering, bookmarking, flickr pro that keeps up to speed with everything taking place in the World Wide Web from live streaming to flash journalism. My only question: is there enough time in the day?
Image used courtesy of Laughing Squid at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/1184346933
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