The Juxtaposition of Journalism and Technology

For our second lecture, the class was introduced to another guest lecturer, David Johnson. He is an Assistant Professor at American University, where he teaches a course in digital journalism, interactive storytelling and convergence media. He appropriately came to speak to us on digital journalism and the effects new technology has had on the media.

A self-proclaimed hard-ass, Professor Johnson gave his opinion on how to improve journalism. Firstly, in order to save journalism, there need to be more journalists. The basis of journalism is you are supposed to summarize information for other people when they cannot be at the event to receive the information themselves. In short, since journalists are at a specific event and others are not, it is the journalists’ job to report what happened at the event. The second aspect in order to save journalism is to that journalists have to act less like story-tellers and more like social scientists. The example Professor Johnson kept referring to was that of a report on Snooki. Professor Johnson argued that a story on Snookie was not a news-worthy event, but rather be kept in entertainment areas, such as People magazine. Professor Johnson contended that news journalists need to stop focusing on entertaining their constituents and concentrate on informing people more significant news.

While these are all valid points, there is a bigger problem facing journalism. That problem has to do with the American public. As television has gotten more channels, many people base what they watch not on what is of the most value but rather on what is the most entertaining. This has meant that many people choose to watch other programming over the news. According to a report from the Pew Center for the People and the Press, only 57% of Americans watch TV news on a typical day, while only 40% read a newspaper, and 36% listen to the news on the radio. On an average day, only 81% of Americans access news. This number is down almost 10% from 1994, even though there is more access to news.

In order to implement Professor Johnson’s ideas on improving journalism, there has to be an effort made to fix the trend of less news viewing. Some believe that Americans have become overwhelmed by the amount of news and information out there, so much so that they choose to ignore it rather than try to go through all the material.

One possible solution to this problem is to utilize social media sites and blogs to expose the news to people. At this moment there are over 156 million blogs on the internet. Additionally, there are over 500 million users on the social media site, Facebook. With that kind of populace, if journalists found a way to effectively reach them, the news would reach a vast majority of Americans.

In this day and age, with so many resources available, there is no valid reason as to why 19% of Americans do not have access to news. It is up to this next generation to encourage interest in the news and in journalism.