Oluwarantimi Ajibode
A8JL116 Online Journalism
CA One.
1224 words.
Journalism 2.0: Assessing How the Internet has Changed Journalism

‘We are living at a moment of profound and prolonged media transition. Media mediates between people, communities, organizations institutions and industries. The internet has changed the relationship between Journalism from a one-way asymmetric model of communication to a more participatory and and collective system where citizens have the ability to participate in the news production process. Journalism can be referred to as “ambient” which is described as the omnipresent nature of news in society through the proliferation of one way media into public spaces. This is however based on a one directional model of mass media where the audience is framed as the receptor of communication. In journalism recently, a trend has emerged whereby it is influenced by it’s occupational ideology providing a general audience with information of general interest in a in a balanced objective and ethical way do not seem to fit all that well with the lived realities of reporters and edit with the communities they are supposed to serve. In the context of a precarious and, according to the International Federation of Journalists, increasingly “atypical” professional work life, ongoing efforts by corporations to merge and possibly converge news operations, and an emerging digital media culture where the consumer is also a producer of public information, the identity of the journalist must be seen as “liquid”(Bauman, 2000).
Despite the fact that the Internet has been in existing since the 1970s, the fact that the user-friendly Web browsers was only introduced brings about an increase in the number of users who are making use of this particular medium. In which these Web browsers also allowed traditional media to exploit the Web in order to bring content and capture audiences and also to reveal in the extensive space. Radio and TV content is limited by air time; print is limited by pages. These restrictions disappear on the Web, thereby giving reporters and editors more headway in doing news well. The Web also blurs the distinction among media. On the Web, radio and television sites deliver audio, video, and text, and online newspapers can be read, seen, or listened to, blurring the distinctions among the media.
Today when a story breaks, news consumers do not got to the web they have never heard of. They go quickly to the” branded” websites set up by established media.
Over the last decade, new modes of story telling and journalism has emerged. For example, the way the captivating stories on health and the environment have been portrayed; A very large amount of powerful online stories which deal with the health and environmental issues communities around the globes are facing. These stories however used the media as a tool to bringing the stories of wounded soldiers, gas drillers, and migrant farmers to the audience in ways that gave them a more direct involvement of their strife. For instance, the New York Times did a piece titled, Downside of the boom and where oil and politics meet. In this piece, the impact of the gas boom in rural North Dakota was talked about with the use of huge interstitial full page photos and video between the text. Also, the use of data animations and satellite imagery. Further more, there’s also the use of the multilingual multimedia storytelling which is basically the use of multiple languages to tell a story on the web. Now, digital journalism can speak in new ways to their audiences. An example of this is when The Guardian created an interactive documentary they called a “Global Guide to the First World War” in seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic or Hindi. And the European Journalism Center funded a great investigative report on “The Dark Side of the Italian Tomato,” publishing it in English, Spanish, Italian and French in partnership with a number of media outlets. Additionally, of recent national and international publications, small local digital newsrooms are putting an emphasis on multilingual reporting. A good example is New Brunswick Today, in New Jersey, which publishes online in English and Spanish, as well as prints a monthly bilingual newspaper.
According to Raju Narisetti, who is a senior vice president and deputy head of strategy at the new News corporation and who’s also a graduate of school. of journalism, He said, “Newsrooms now face a new competitor: our advertisers. The rise of “sponsored content” and “native advertising” has created a major threat to newsrooms. Companies have also become skilled content producers, vying for “the single non-renewable resource my readers have, which is their time.”
Taking a look at Facebook and other social media that provide new avenues to journalism, the modern day audience doesn’t expect to work hard to “find” the news. Today’s digital journalists must be able to write, report and market their stories. “In the print world, there is a position called circulation marketer, whose job is to figure out how to make money. That doesn’t exist in the digital world,” said Narisetti. “In 2013 the definition of a journalist must include ‘I will do everything I can to bring more people to my journalism.’”
The approach of Experimenting, testing and trying out in front of real users would play a very important role when it comes to finding the best ways to solve the problem of the audiences. “We keep track of open rates and click-through rates to see what stories they’re interested in, what do they engage with. But another thing that’s important in addition to listening what people say is observing what they do. We try to bring them in the newsroom and observe how they interact with the newsletter, where do they click, how deep do they scroll,” said Sunnie Huang , Newsletters Editor at The Economist . The newsrooms or organizations are trying to overcome these challenges by going through various forms of initiatives. They plan on putting their audience in the centers of their work, thereby m forgetting to carry the audience along- they tend to forget about who’s reading their work and who it is for.

The future of the newsroom will involve innovative, tech-driven and transparent journalism that will make readers more involved in and make them an important part of the story, it wouldn’t matter if those stories are paid for or not. It would acknowledge the involvement of the audience and would create a space where they can comment, vote, contact and many more. The newsroom at The Washington Post, for example, which may be considered among the most traditional of mainstream journalism businesses, has been radically overhauled ‘‘to think about one primary goal: bringing as many visitors as possible to Washingtonpost.com’’ (Peters, J., 2012).
Bibliography
‘The Future of Journalism’- Bob Franklin
