Internet & Journalism

With the global recession tripping up a newspaper industry, it is no wonder that the journalists are worrying about their future and how the future of journalism will be like.

Have you ever wonder how does internet shape the future of journalism?

Before the news media started to embrace new technologies by utilizing web 2.0 and the social media, traditional media of communicating and expression of news worthy information had been the only means. There is no direct answer as to how the decline of newspaper will affect the society. In our everyday life, do we really need professional journalists to do their job so as to provide us with the news that are happening every minute every second?

In today’s society, the newspaper is truly important to nearly every adult. Without newspaper, citizens will lose their main source of news about Parliament debates. Crime stories will not be known to most, foreign news will remain far away from our sight and readers might miss a wide range or commentary and analysis written by professional journalist. No doubt without newspaper, it is still possible to move the content of the world into the World Wide Web. However, is this really the best option or is the traditional newspaper the best option?

Let us take a look at some of the pros and cons internet!

Internet has its advantages in serving our lives in many ways. It truly helps us to be more informed, more connected and less ignorant to the things occurring around the world. It also helps individual to experience different point of views from people all over the world. With internet, any news uploaded will be able to reach a wider audience as compared to traditional media.

In contrast, internet has its disadvantages too. There is a possibility of information overload because uploading of news is free and there will be a wide range of information available online. Online sources could also be lack of quality as well as credibility because they are generally not controlled by any institutions. Also, even though we are living in the 21^st century, not everyone owns a computer with internet connection.

I believe the internet will have some effects on the future of the journalism such that the more educated people will probably read their news from the internet while the older/poor people will read their news from the newspaper. This would definitely result in lesser copies of newspaper being printed in the near future. With that, journalists will also earn lesser as compared to now.

Looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the internet, we can conclude that it will have a vast effect on the future of journalism. We could clearly see that if news were to be broadcast via the internet, there will still be a large group of poor people who could not afford computers and this will be an important factor for the journalists to take note of. Therefore, as long as there are still people who are willing to buy the newspapers daily, I do not foresee or think that the traditional media will cease any time soon.