The Internet changes News Forever

The traditional platforms of which news was delivered on was an event in homes once upon a time. The scene illustrated above was common place during the state broadcaster’s main evening news. The news was a source of one-way communication. There was a small amount of players involved in reporting, reading and gathering content and the ordinary citizen was a mere spectator of the news.

Today because of the Internet news has changed dramatically in a short space of time and how we get our news will evolve further again as technologies continue to advance. Mark Little, who is widely recognised as both an innovator and early adaptor of the changing news environment details how ‘things’ have changed;

When I became a reporter, almost 20 years ago, my job was to dig up scarce, precious facts and deliver them to a passive audience. Today, scarcity has been replaced by an unimaginable surplus and that audience is actively building its own newsroom.

Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist wrote in 2007 ‘news – as a habituating, slightly fetishistic, more or less entertaining experience that defines a broad common interest – is ending. Newspapers, the network evening news, news magazines, even 24 hour cable news channels, these providers and packagers of the news, are imperilled media.’

The consumer can now choose their news, apps like Flipboard has millions of people logging in every day to read and collect the news they care about, curating their favourite stories into their own magazines on any topic imaginable. Prior the ‘New Media Age’ the news chose us, now we choose the news.

w Media?  New Media might be considered a superior term for the social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook but it’s a lot more than that. Wikipedia has become one of the most popular storehouses of Knowledge in the new media age and it’s interesting to know how they define New Media

“A broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of new media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is the digitizing of content into bits. There is also a dynamic aspect of content production which can be done in real time, but these offerings lack standards and have yet to gain traction”

So what is old media then? Old Media, or as it more commonly known as is traditional media, refers to broadcast and print, the media that talked ‘at’ us.

Stagnant traditional media has no survival rate but radio and television still have a life and can actually strive when they statically merge new and old, making news interactive, a two way conversation, engaging the consumer and digitalizing it and allowing people to take what they want and dispose of the rest. The humble newspaper will have a harder fight on their hands in the physical sense as people will no longer feel the need to pay for new and it is estimated that in less that thirty years we will see the last of newspaper as we know them today.  

When a news story breaks today, it’ll break on social media first, it will be in the next hour when it hits the hourly news bulletin on radio, hours after that the state broadcaster has it and it will be the next day before one reads it in their newspaper but in the mean-time the conversation keeps going via New Media platforms. Many learnt of Michael Jackson’s death on June 25th 2009 through social media first, then the web, then radio and television, and finally, newspapers – and other print media such as magazines.

We are all journalists and photographers today, creating and gathering content on platforms such as twitter, Facebook, blogs etc.  Newspapers are citing twitter handles for pictures they are printing and tweets they are quoting. So is the profession of journalism dead? No but the profession has changed.

“People still need journalism skills, but they will just be used in a different way. Today there are so many different variants of journalism  now – people need to have that knowledge of cross platforms and what’s going on in different types of on-line journalism”  said Gary Mullen, co-owner of recruitment firm prosperity.

Think of Ernie Pyle, the American journalist most known for reporting on World War II, he understood his responsibility as a witness, he didn’t just write, he summoned images that made suffering intimate to a distant audience. The reader wasn’t there but Ernie made them feel they were.

 

The characteristics that made Ernie a good journalist are still needed today. Technology changes but humans don’t, the element of the news hasn’t changed, we still want the human story, a Malaysian Airline goes missing and it’s the personal story of those 239 passengers that people want to know. We as people are interested in other people and that won’t change but New Media gives us bigger scope to find out the personal story behind the headlines and two minute news bulletins.



News driven talk shows across radio and television such as The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk and Prime Time on RTE implore the news further, collecting the human story and at times create and gather stories with professional journalistic ability that would never surface if they hadn’t, we saw this especially with the crèche investigation.  It’s worth noting that Prime Time and Tonight with Vincent Brown ( #vinb ) are two current affairs programs which often find themselves in the twitter trending list.

Televised current affairs programs have a future but people are watching them differently, double screening and continuing the conversation long after the one hour televised broadcast ends. We are living in a time where everybody is interested in the news, but just not the same story.

As viewers are taking the information, discussing it, taking an angle of it and writing about it on our blogs.

 

Journalists compile facts and tell a story that interests the public. Public Relations practitioners are storytellers too. They public relations practitioner needs to ask what story do they want to tell about their company or client?  But how can the PR practitioner be picked out as the storyteller when we are essentially all storytellers.

The field of Public Relations is increasingly a world driven by capitalizing on opportunities to speak directly to the audience, unfiltered and bypassing what was traditionally the “middle” man – the reporter, print or broadcast. No longer is the PR person’s principal job to mail or fax the press release and follow up with a phone-call. Today, because of New Media people in public relations are becoming more like reporters conveying direct, unfiltered good news about their client rather than before when the Public Relation professional was only called in to deflect bad publicity.    

Today anyone with a laptop and Internet access can produce and distribute informational content that once was the domain of the print / broadcast journalist or the public relations professional.  The term “Citizen Journalist” has come to represent a person who uses all tools of the multimedia journalist – text, audio, video and graphics – telling a story that might not otherwise receive coverage in traditional media platforms. But how does the Citizen Journalist effect the profession of Public Relations? First of all before a public relations practitioner could easily identify all media organizations but now the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days. Civic Journalists can develop a large following and the public practitioner needs to recognize that the blogger’s voice is as important as the journalist writing for the Irish Examiner.

Citizen journalism allow PR practitioners have wider access of the information and demonstrate them and have more reliability of the news that helps PR practitioners and professional journalists prove the news however, it’s major weakness is that the stories of the citizen journalism  may lack  quality and crediability. A student studying Public Relations today is well advised to put social media on his / her most needed skills set.

“With changes in technology & the explosion of media channels, classic public relations models can no longer adequately describe public relations, especially as the relationships between organizations and their stakeholders have grown increasingly complex and malleable” Bey-Ling Sha

Public Relations is still about building relationships, it’s often joked about that ‘twitter is just a collection of PR people and journalists’ and to an extent there is truth in the joke, it’s easier than ever to get in touch with a journalist and it’s even easier for a public relations practitioner to build relationships with journalist via social networking sites like twitter. Then there is the power of social media, the best example of a company capitalizing on an opportunity via social media was during the blackout at last year’s Super Bowl when Oreo tweeted this;

The tweet was re-tweeted 10,000 times within one hour, it even had a bigger reaction than the television advertisement that was broadcasted that night during a commercial break of the sporting event.

So what does all this mean for Public Relations, well the growth of social media and citizen journalism means that the old ‘push’ system of PR distribution, in which clients and their advisers largely decided what information to release and when, has been replaced by a pull mechanism in which global audiences including customers, the media, regulators, investors, politicians and others are firmly in control of how they consume all manner of news and content. There has been a rapid reassessment among PR companies of their digital capabilities. They have opened the floodgates to a raft of new firms claiming skills in managing technology or monitoring social media. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and old media masquerading as new media has led to a loss of control in corporate communications. It has reduced response times for potential problems. Audiences can make assumptions based on scant and unverifiable online data.

Tim Burt writes ‘ the perceived behavioural change in the media has prompted new engagement tactics by the PR industry. The old ways of doing things, the simple art of story placement has been transformed into the communications equivalent of three-dimensional chess, in which clients and their advisers have to consider several moves ahead before making their opening play.’  

The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper…..the speech of course was Rupert Murdock’s address to the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in Washington DC on 13 April 2005, in which he outlined what he perceived to be the ‘fast developing reality’ confronting the newspaper industry and today a more apt edition of the is a traditional proclamation would be ‘The News is dead, long live the News.’