The Future of Journalism: Can Journalism Survive?
By Olivia Wong
The journalism industry has gone through various changes in history, from traditional media such as newspapers and radio broadcasting to new media such as Facebook and Twitter. The profession has undergone decades of decline in readership, revenue, and public trust. According to our class discussion, The Future of Journalism, “Technology has radically changed how news is gathered, distributed and monetized. These changes continue at a fast pace, requiring that news organizations adopt a posture of continual development”.
It is definitely possible for journalism to continue to survive in the next decade. In order to do so, we must as readers and future journalists- take action to further expand and grow within the industry. Some may argue that journalism itself is dying, but in reality, journalism is expanding with social media platforms and technology allowing the former audiences and sources to become the reporters themselves. It is important we take advantage of these technological advances with social media in order for journalism to survive.
Communicating with the audience is one of the many main factors journalists must do in order to grow. It doesn’t make sense for readers to not be able to comment on news stories online, however, many newspapers still either don’t have the feature on the site, don’t use it, or have various rules to which stories allow comments and which do not. It makes sense that in many cases it is because the comments are vulgar, but a clear line and definition of what stories have comments have not yet been drawn.
Furthermore, communicating and building a relationship with the readers is crucial for earning trust with your audience. Journalists should be expected to engage with readers through comments, blogs, and Twitter.
Transparency is also another key element in journalism. It would be interesting to show the public what goes behind the scenes of news reporting and how exactly the news is distributed. This would be another way to engage with the audience as most readers do not know how their news stories came about and how the editing and publishing process works.
Moreover, the future of journalism will increasingly depend on consumers paying for the news directly, as content distributors like Facebook and Google take up the lion’s share of digital advertising dollars.
According to the article, The Future of Journalism is Bright and Paid, in 2017 —
“The Guardian topped 400,000 paying readers. Digital revenues climbed by 15%, and revenues from voluntary donations and subscriptions outstripped ad revenues for the first time in the paper’s history”.
This reveals that people are willing to pay for quality journalism. If publishers can understand and serve them well, the public should have the option to pay. Furthermore, attracting subscribers requires investment in premium news content and focusing on the audience needs.
All in all, clickbait has had its day, and the era of impoverished, ad-funded, vapid journalism is coming to a close. The future of journalism will be of high quality, investigative, and trustworthy.
