James 1 Tiffany James Dr. McConnell Mass Communications II 21 February 2013 Will Evolving Forms of Journalism Be an Improvement?

Ever since I first learned about journalism Ive been interested in what is going to happen to it. Will the industry make improvements to keep up with the increase of technology and the internet or will it collapse? According to The Economist the journalism industry will continue to improve itself and meet the standards of this technological age and is succeeding. The industry is now taking advantage of social-media technologies which allows more people to take part in gathering, filtering and disturbing news. The Economist uses the example of Osama bin Laden being captured where Sohaib Athar, a computer consultant living in Abbottabad, tweeted a series of tweets that described Bin Ladens capture as it happened. The Economist quoted that surveys in Britain and America suggest that seven to nine percent of the population use Twitter. And Twitter users are the influencers, says Nic Newman, former head of future media at the BBC and now a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. With the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered just by professional reporters and turned into respectable stories, but now regular Joes can contribute helpful information. At first many news organizations were openly hostile towards these new tools. But in the past few years mainstream media organizations have changed their attitudes; which has led to journalist becoming more inclined to use sites like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other

James 2 forms of social media as credible sources of information. Even though social media cant always be used, it is a great way to gauge the mood of the public about an issue. On the other hand Alex Jones believes that the new technology that we have now is disrupting the iron core of journalism; which he describes as fact-based accountability journalism, an expensive, intensive search for information that holds those with power accountable. He starts the article with a comparison, imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each days serious reported news. He goes on to talk about how all of the things that are reported on social media like Paris Hiltons latest escapes or an account of the Yankees game isnt a part of the iron core of journalism. He goes on to state that that, inside the core, there is a hierarchy of news, each type in its own way. The first part is bearing witness which is the most important because it lets the public know what is going on in the world. But its not always enough for the public some news does a follow up which is the second part and requires the reports to stay with the story and keep digging up information. Then there is explanatory journalism which is where the reporters speak to sources, unearth data, gather facts, and master complexity. And at the top of the hierarchy is investigative reporting. This is the toughest part of journalism because the reporter needs to keep information secret for these kinds of stories. This was until recently when, iron core reporting in all forms has been artificially protected and subsidized because of an American bargain in which public service was harnessed to voracious capitalism as news spanned a business. What Jones is trying to say is that news that was once pure and honest and the public could count on to be true is no longer as reliable as it should be due to where some of its information comes from.

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Both authors make good points in their articles and I cant really say if I agree or not, (the jury still out on that one), but I can say that I hope the journalism industry can learn hope to work with what they have and make the best of it without compromising their integrity.