Monday, October 06, 2008 Editorials: Brave, new world
HOW will newsrooms and journalism schools prepare for the future, with the myriad opportunities and challenges spawned by technology?
This conundrum was posed to Cebu journalists and Mass Communication students of local colleges during the Sept. 22 discussion on “Media and Technology.”
One of the events conducted during the recently concluded Cebu Press Freedom Week, this forum featured Mel Velarde, Philippine Commissioner to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and Glenda Gloria, chief operating officer of the ABS-CBN News Channel.
Velarde spoke on “The New Wide World of Media.” Gloria, who is also the managing editor of the Newsbreak online magazine, discussed the implications of “Engaging the Media with New Technology.”
Far from being the center
Velarde encouraged the audience to explore the new technology, which has collapsed the old borders that limited communication to the proximate or the immediate.
To those who are open to learning how to navigate the new technology, the rewards are the ease of access, the seemingly borderless reach and the power to meet multiple needs (i.e. infotainment) with one virtual portal fusing the verbal, the visual and the interactive.
On the other hand, Velarde showed the findings of social network analysis that mass media is far from being at the center of the links and crosscurrents formed within networks. Thus, the information transmitted by mass media sometimes deviates from the crux of concerns and issues that lies at the heart of the network.
To position its messages from the peripheral to the central or, in a less manipulative sense, to single out and disseminate the issues prioritized in social networks, ideally to cover those stemming from the grassroots, journalists should learn to tap new technology to achieve convergence.
As Gloria pointed out, more newsrooms are linking with citizen journalists.
After being successful in monitoring elections, citizen journalists are being tapped by newsrooms promoting the good journalism practice of having multiple and diversified sources. This democratizes the agenda-setting process, which has long been dominated by a few power brokers, including mass media.
Challenges are considerable though. What can bridge the country’s digital divide: the rift between those who have and do not have access to new technology? How can the news media help develop and sustain citizen journalists in places lying beyond the urban centers, where traditional politics still holds sway and journalists are either few, cowed or killed?
Electronic writing on the wall
Closer to the newsroom, journalists, both the professional and the aspiring, should watch closely and then appropriately respond to the trend of newsroom convergence.
As a news manager involved in innovations reshaping two newsrooms, Gloria observed the gradual, protracted process involved in a “flat” newsroom’s evolution into one where journalists are not just equipped and trained but converted to the challenge of communicating the same message through varied portals.
As first discussed in Thomas L. Friedman’s book, “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” advances in technology, particularly in communication, have changed the nature of competition and innovation. Friedman wrote that from the old perception that competition was a “level playing field” —or “flat,” to use the metaphor—there has been a major shift in perception that requires players, including the news media, to keep their niche in a market where traditional divisions are becoming irrelevant.
For students aspiring to be future journalists—Friedman’s “new players in a new playing field”—technology-savvy skills are required as “new habits for new collaboration.” Since college curricula may not be flexible enough to immediately reflect this industry trend, journalism teachers must update their thinking, skills and andragogy to prepare their students for new career paths in convergence.
Adjustments within existing newsrooms are more complex and sensitive.
Gloria’s observations mirror the findings of media case studies uploaded on the Internet. To achieve Friedman’s triple convergence—“new players, on a new playing field, develop new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration”—newsroom owners and managers have to address first the human factor: reporters, photographers and editors who, singly and collectively, represent the engine of growth and the obstacle derailing journalism’s leaps and bounds.
