The Future of News

In Journalism class a group presented on the future of news, aka, how journalism will survive as the Internet pretty much takes over. They showed us a “Did you know?” video that underscored how quickly the world is changing. It was a kind of frightening thing. It made it clear that journalism had to change to keep up with the rapidly changing world, but I don’t think blogs and Facebook and “citizen journalists” are going to run professional journalists out of business.

There will always be a place for the Fourth Estate because as people grow more educated about the world and about the Internet they also become more skeptical of what they read. Journalists, whose job is to verify facts and tell the truth the best they can, are still valuable because they can provide a measure by which the news on blogs can be judged for veracity. That said, I am glad news is changing to include blogs. Journalists have now a wide range of sources so they can better get the whole story, and even if they miss something, the truth can still come out because anyone can tell it.

One of the issues with digitizing news is that it is easy to fake a picture or video when it is digital than when it is analog. This will be a problem and readers/viewers will have to be discerning when watching the news. For example, the Onion News Network is fake, and while there may be a few facts in their “broadcasts,” the news is not real and for entertainment only. However, the set-up of the ONN looks like a real news cast and credulous viewers may mistake it for truth. If the ONN can do this to crack jokes, others can do this to deceive purposefully.

Electronic news is great, if we understand the risks associated with it (photoshopped pictures).