A Journo Grad in the Digital Age

Editors many years ago: “Go out and find stories! Gather! Assess! Create! Be back by 5 before we go to printing! Give the readers what they want!”

Editors in 2015: “Go on Twitter and find something. Maybe people will allow us to use their photos and information instead of actually going to the scene and reporting on it.”

That’s from the newsroom by the way.

The public are taking control of what they want to read compared to 60 years ago, when they didn’t have much choice. In the old system, consumers had to adapt their behaviour to the news media by watching the news at a certain time on TV or waking up in the morning to read what is happening around the world. Today, journalists have to focus on the reader’s interests and they do this by using social media sites. Now, in the digital age of web and social media, things got a bit more complicated.

Most breaking news come from Twitter first. It will start off with someone witnessing a serious event that’s happened, tweeting it to the public, posting a picture, a journalist finds it, their mainstream Twitter page starts tweeting about it, their rival news sources start tweeting about it too, until finally.. it starts to trend. And whatever trends on Twitter is what everyone is interested in. Sometimes the story isn’t newsworthy at all, mostly about gossip and what celebrities are doing. And that’s what all these so called news stations want to focus on. I’m not a huge fan of the news anymore. But still, information can be shared from the click of a button. Anyone can go on Twitter, Facebook, create a blog and write their own stories.

However I don’t think the digital age has completely fucked over journalism. Journalism is still here. It’s just changing and adapting over the years. I still have voice recordings of interviews I’ve conducted with journalists who use technology to their advantage.

I had an interesting conversation with Neal Augenstein, a man who is known as the pioneer of mobile phone reporting. He was the first reporter to use his iPhone as his main tool for reporting in 2010. All he does is pay for a few apps to help him edit photos and videos. He also purchases equipment to use with his iPhone, one of them known as the ‘windscreen’. This is used to cover the end of the iPhone so that he could record videos and it blocks out the sound of wind and background noise. He’s covered a wide range of stories from hurricanes to protests.

Neal has been working in the journalism industry for the last 19 years in Washington DC. He works for WTOP FM and also contributes to WTOP.com. From carrying recorders, microphones, cables, video cameras and mobile phones that used to weigh about 15 pounds, he now carries an iPhone with him.

There was an interesting point he told me about the ethics and tradition of journalism and how he believes that will never change.

“Journalism training is more important now than ever before because of the quick ways that news can be disseminated. Journalists need to have very good old school ethics training before getting into the business.”

Is that really true? Doesn’t the large amount of information available on the Internet create a risk to the quality of information? Especially when you have news sources jumping on to whatever people tweet about without doing their own research.

As a journalism graduate, this topic of technology and journalism is something that I’ve always been interested in. I wrote my dissertation on how news is reported in this day and age. But I don’t really call myself a journalist. I just tell people I’m a journalism graduate. Unless I’m working for a news channel or newspaper, I don’t think I should call myself a journalist. For now, I tell people I’m a writer. That’s more flexible. Writing is what I want to do in my life, I’m not too fussed on what platform I want to focus on.

But studying journalism has taught me a lot of skills, for personal use and professional use. It gave me the courage to talk, pick up the phone and call people, not being afraid to ask questions, gain the right skills of communication, learn about different styles of writing, spelling and grammar, the transition of journalism in the digital world, how to write news stories, and most importantly learning about the ethics and the trustworthiness you need to have as a journalist to report real facts. That last part is still up for question.

This topic comes to my mind whenever I’m searching for jobs. Now I’m seeing a lot more vacancies for online writers as opposed to print newspaper jobs. You get PR jobs, Photography, Copywriters for online websites, Website Designers, Digital Marketing and the best one: Social Media Managers. Who would’ve thought you could literally sit on a laptop and tweet, Facebook and Instagram stuff for a living?

Working online is what I’m interested in now. There’s a lot more online than on print.

It makes me wonder how information will be delivered to the public in 50 years. Will robots sit at a desk and broadcast the news for us? I’m dwelling on it too much. I’ll save it for another post.