Hyperlink Assignment

Okay, for our ASTU hyperlink assignment. Since I don’t have Convergences with me at the moment, I’ll have to simply make an “informative” paragraph, based on a Wikipedia format. But what topic to cover? I have to admit, rather than thinking up something clever myself, I just went to Academic Search Complete and randomly searched words until something interesting emerged. So here it is, something we’ve been discussing in Journalism recently (credit to Prof. Alfred Hermida’s lecture notes):

***Note*** You probably have to be logged on to UBC VPN to view the academic sources in the article.


The Challenge with New Media: Old practices, New Format


The media world is very set in its ways, and many of its current practices have remained unchanged since the advent of newspapers after the development of the Gutenberg Press in the mid-1400s. The role of journalists as singularly responsible for setting the standards for newsworthy topics is no longer entirely acceptable, as new media liberates the distribution of information. With this being said, anyone can be a “journalist”, in the sense that they are distributers information.


With the bulk of media in transition from old to new (that is, from the television and print media format it has followed for the last half-century, to new digital forms like websites, forums, and blogs), traditional media outlets, and the media business in general, are facing issues of audience loss, revenue loss, atomization of information, loss of diversity, and deterioration of quality. People are getting accustomed to free, fast, and quantitative information on the web, demands that are only enhancing the problems faced by traditional media.


While there are many positive aspects to the proliferation of information through new media, such as abundance, interactivity, and the collapse of geographical limitations, the potential extinction of traditional media due to audience and revenue loss could be catastrophic to the quality of information available on the net. Already, it is noticeable that less original information is out there—rather, many “amateur” sources are interpretations, or even copies, of traditional sources—leading to loss of research and information diversity. Add to this the speed with which modern journalists are expected to produce articles, and the lack of regulation with which amateur articles are produced, and a potential deterioration of quality ensues.


If the old media moguls are to survive this digital shift in the media, they will have to adapt new methods of production and distribution, and manipulate the prospectively limitless options of technology.