Journalism has always played a huge role in society; Thomas Jefferson famously said that if given the choice of newspapers or Government, he’d take newspapers; journalism was that important to society he insisted.By the time of the 20th Century, journalism had become a corporate force in society; 1980 saw the launch of the first 24-hour global news network, CNN. Since then thousands of other regional, national and International companies have set up their own 24-hour television news networks.
Creation of HTML
Networks such as CNN, BBC News 24 and Sky News, have traditionally been the place for breaking news, arguably this all changed due to Tim Berners – Lee’s creation of hypertext technology in 1990 that became known as the World Wide Web.
Berners – Lee created the first browser and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which enabled anyone with a modest amount of knowledge to publish documents on web pages.
The World Wide Web became publicly available on August the 6th 1991. Berners-Lee’s creation allowed an expansion of the extremely limited access Internet, which had been around two decades prior to his creation.
There are more than half a billion people in the world today who access the Internet on a regular basis, 30% of them live in the United States.
The Internet is a $1 trillion dollar industry and rising with people spending longer periods of time browsing the web.
For Example - Americans spend an average of 7 hours and 30 minutes per week on the Internet at home. Arguably the web is now the most powerful of all media due to its global 24/7 reach and the vast amount of information it offers.
Shift in Communication
In the past 150 years we’ve essentially had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (newspapers, radio and TV) and one-to-one (letters and telephone).
The Internet for the first time gives us many-to-many and few-to-few communications. This new method of communication that the Internet offers has vast implications for the audience and the producers of news, as it becomes harder to distinguish the difference between the two.
Blogs are a perfect example of this, anyone can write a blog on anything news related or otherwise, but when it is news related a shift in journalism practice occurs, the former consumer of mass media news has now become the producer.
The first blog was set up by Jorn Barger in December 1997, Barger described his page as a “weblog”, a term that would later be replaced by the expression “blog”.
Overtime blogs would prove to be a vital part of the World Wide Web and play a huge role in journalism and its future.
Social Media & Journalism
Over the last few years’ social media technology has made it even harder to differentiate between those who produce the news and those who consume it.
In 1996 four Israeli technologists invented the Instant Messenger system (IM) for desktop computers called ICQ, this would become the seedling of social media technology.
The first social network site was set up in 1997, named SixDegrees it let people make profiles and connect with friends. This interactivity on the web became known as Web 2.0 technology.
Most people regard all technology seen on the Internet before it went bust in 2000 as Web 1.0 which was all about establishing an online presence and providing news, information and entertainment for users to consume.
After the bust, the Internet entered a new phase; Web 2.0 seen before on social network sites that were set up in the late 1990s but which failed to catch on.
Web 2.0 implies that many of the exponential growth in online traffic will now be focused on social networking, establishing online communities and allowing users to participate in the creation and modification of content.
Web 2.0 in simple terms means the creation of interactive websites that allows users to participate and create their own content. Web 2.0-gained momentum in 2002 – 2003 with the social network, Friendster, that allowed people to write their own content and have their own page.
More recently Web 2.0 technology has taken up a larger portion of the web, with the introduction of Myspace in 2004 and then Facebook in 2007; the most successful social network of all time, other Web 2.0 sites include photo and video content sharing sites like Flickr, Youtube and Ustream and more recently the introduction of the 140 character update site; Twitter which is seen as something of a global phenomenon at the moment.
Online News
Online news has been around a lot longer than most people think, The Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio began offering an online edition through CompuServe in 1980, but the Internet Service Provider (ISP) was relatively small and only served four thousand members.
By 1995 there were over 330 newspapers on the World Wide Web serving over a million people.
By 2003 there were over three thousand U.S newspapers offering an online service.
The television cable news network, CNN launched its online service called CNN Interactive on 30th August 1995, followed two years later by the BBC who launched BBC News Online in November 1997.
When these news networked launched their sites, they approached the design and content in a similar way to how they approached their television audience.
They pushed news towards the viewer, the audience were provided with the same content online as that found on the television. BBC News Online was initially a success.
By early 1998 BBC Online had been confirmed as the leading British Internet content site, with BBC News Online recording 8.17 million page impressions in March.
However, after the Internet bust in 2000 news organisations began to realise that a change was taking place, online users no longer wanted stories pushed at them.
Instead they wished to select what they felt like reading, this is known as the shift in journalism consumption from a push approach to a pull approach, and social networks were about to make this change unavoidable for news corporations to ignore.
Social media and Web 2.0 technologies have ultimately changed the way in which journalists work and how the audience consumes, produces news.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment