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Technology's effect on our media landscape
October 12, 2005

I continue to be struck by the daily, almost hourly changes that the Internet, along with easily carried mobile technologies like cellphone and digital cameras, are having on how we get our news - and the need for traditional media to quickly evolve or get lost as the crush of citizen journalists rush by them. With speed that was hard to imagine just a few years ago, these technologies are allowing citizens of the world to create, manage, and distribute content (images, stories, video) in a way that was never possible in our history. It’s changed not only our news cycle from a day to a few hours to now, just minutes…if that. We haven’t reached a point where people are disregarding our major media outlets (television, radio, major newspapers), and we shouldn’t expect that to happen anytime soon. However, this same ease for individuals to publish and report at will has been greeted in various ways by those same media outlets that are, for the first time in their history, second on the scene to a lot of happenings.

To their credit, many in the media have welcomed this change and adopted some of the photography and reporting into existing programming or stories. The BBC documented how individuals in London posted pictures of the terror bombings in that city’s July attacks online for all to see, and how bloggers who were on the scene or in the area were documenting the situation – as it happened. Right now, the BBC is using comments from persons affected by the massive earthquake in Asia this weekend on its story pages, and has even created an email address for people to send in photographs of the devastation. MSNBC’s "Connected" shows images of blogs weighing in on topics being covered on the air, even inviting bloggers to participate as panelists – sometimes taking on the person being written about on that blog. In a way, this is taking the "letter to the editor" from your local newspaper to the extreme. At the very least, it’s showing that today’s big media is beginning to understand this changing dynamic and where its viewers are getting their news and information. The smart media outlets will try to improve upon their existing platforms and find a way to embrace and harness this new force in journalism.

Posted by Michael Kempner at October 12, 2005 05:12 PM