'Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet' Mari (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Internet and News: Changes in Content on Newspaper Websites
2009
Journalists justify their professional practice as a service that informs the citizenry necessary for democracy, but trends over the last century, since the rise of professional aspirations among journalists, have involved a steady move away from textual practices of current event coverage centered on citizens and nearby places and toward journalists' own opinions of more distant issues. But the rise of the internet, in direct competition with print news, has accompanied several shifts in the news journalists produce. A content analysis for three mainstream U.S. newspaper internet sites in 2005 continues a project that has gathered measurements for the same newspapers since the 1890s and replicates a 2001 study, when most U.S. papers had established a presence online. On one hand, politics, as a core topic in public spirited journalism, has continued the older trends for the who, what, when, and where in story content: toward relatively long, analytical stories with explanations from officials and groups and references to other time periods and more distant places. On the other hand, accident stories typify the new, emergent news: short, less analytical, event-centered coverage linked to individuals, other current happenings, and an especially local focus. On their web editions, the larger, wealthier news organization tended toward the older news, but the smaller or less profitable organizations moved toward the new kind of news. The focus on current events and local politics may be salutary for the informed citizenry, but the loss of context for events makes it unclear whether the internet is an entirely positive news outlet. (255 words)
The news environment in advanced industrial democracies is undergoing a tremendous series of changes driven in a large part by the emergence, spread and evolution of the internet. The once ubiquitous scenario of a string of national, regional and local news outlets with largely captive audiences and secure revenue streams has fundamentally altered. In a period of fifteen years, the net has helped to further deterritorialize news markets, reconfigure media competition, fragment audiences, transform news reception and content production, and has forced a reassessment of journalistic roles. It is this rapid period of evolution and its consequences for news and the wider democratic public sphere which forms the main focus of this chapter.
A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies 1960-1990
Routledge, 2019
A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies provides a swift analysis of the computerization of the newsroom, from the mid-1960s through to the early 1990s. It focuses on how word processing and a number of related affordances, including mobile-reporting tools, impacted the daily work routines of American news workers. The narrative opens with the development of mainframes and their attendant use as databases in large, daily newspapers, It moves on to the "minicomputer" era and explores initial news-worker experiences with computers for editing and publication. Following this, the book examines the microprocessor era, and the rise of "smart" terminals, "microcomputers," and off-the-shelf hardware/software, along with the increasing use of computers in smaller news organizations. Mari then turns to the use of pre-internet networks, wire-services and bulletin boards deployed for user interaction. He looks at the integration of decentralized computer networks in newsrooms, with a mix of content-management systems and PCs, and the increasing use of pagers and cellphones for news-gathering, including the shift from "portable" to mobile conceptualizations for these technologies. A Short History of Disruptive Journalism Technologies is an illuminating survey for students and instructors of journalism studies. It represents an important acknowledgement of the impact of pre-internet technological disruptions which led to the even more disruptive internet- and related computing technologies in the latter 1990s and through the present.
Introduction: The Evolution of Online Journalism
Siapera/The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, 2012
In 1993, a couple of months after the launch of the first web browser, Mosaic, the University of Florida ' s Journalism Department launched what is generally considered to be the first online journalism web site. It was a very basic, static web site, with a picture of the red-bricked wall of the Journalism Department. It was updated only occasionally, at nights and weekends, when the machine was not in use by others, running on a 486-25 processor with 4 megabytes of random access memory (RAM). About a year later, in November 1994, The UK ' s Daily Telegraph launched the Electronic Telegraph , which was a similarly static page, with articles one on top of the other. The online publication followed the rhythm of print publishing, posting online contents once a day. In a 2001 article, Derek Bishton detailed the Electronic Telegraph ' s remit: to explore the new medium, its technological and commercial possibilities, as well as the scope for the launch of the Telegraph as an online brand (Bishton, 2001). And in this rather slow, uneventful manner began the history of online journalism, and the creation of a new kind of journalism that has changed the face of journalism forever. The 20 years or so since then have seen developments that were both gradual, such as the slow adoption of the Internet ' s features of hyperlinking, interactivity, and multimediality, and radical, as witnessed by the shift toward the participatory web and social media. The initial reluctance of journalistic sites to employ these features was eventually replaced with unfettered enthusiasm, while more recently no self-respecting journalistic site remains without a blog, a Facebook, and Twitter account. Thus, the relationship between the new media and journalism, which began in fits and starts, has become a close embrace to the extent that it is difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism. Theorists, practitioners, students, and readers/consumers/users of online journalism are all involved and have a stake in this relationship, and seek to understand how journalism