Jour1111 - Week 2 Lecture

Week 2 Lecture; New News

Once upon a time, there were only few ways of distributing media to the consumers of news and advertising. We knew these mediums as newspapers, magazines, television and radio. However, with the emergence and evolution of the much more efficient forms of mass communication via the internet, the "old media" was naturally selected by us the consumers, to die a slow and painful death. Web 1.0, the first generation of internet platforms was much like an extension of offline media in the way that it was presented and utilised and paved the way for a wave of "new media" which we came to know as Web 2.0 or "the social web" for it's introduction to the world of social networking. The sudden burst of social networking over the internet began to transform consumers in producer-users. This then continued the evolutionary path for Web 3.0 which changed the way we used the internet by adding machine-readablemeaning to the packets of information being sent paving the way for "meta tags". This technology also exploded into the mobile phone world making mobile internet more effective and efficient than ever. 

But what does this all mean for news and journalism? As news platforms began to adapt to these technologies, news and information began to become much more of a collective resource than a media commodity. Newspapers had to expand to online publications to keep up with the demand of instant news and information from their consumers and competitors, however, also creating the problem of how to sustain consistant profit margins. The new tools provided by Web 3.0 and social networking then gave way to a new generation of advertising and thankfully, creativity within online advertising in order to financially sustain online publications. But will this threaten the careers of medern journalists? Hopefully not. As we saw cassettes, VHS and now even DVD's be over run by new media platforms, some older media forms such as vinyl (yeah vinyl!) suffer, but begin to thrive in its new world of technology. In my opinion, newspapers will be the vinyl of the news media world.