Challenges and opportunities as a journalist

Published by Emil Abraham, July 1st, 2022

Today, the media environment is changing in part as a result of technological and market developments largely associated with the rise of digital media. The precise nature of change in the media environment varies in important ways from country to country, but there are some clear, high–level commonalities that represent both opportunities and challenges for journalism, media organisations, and public debate. The three most important developments driven by technological and market forces today are—

The move to an increasingly digital, mobile, and social media environment with increasingly intense competition for attention where legacy media like broadcasters and especially newspapers, while remaining very important news producers are becoming relatively less important as distributors of news and are under growing pressure to develop new digital business models as their existing operations decline or stagnate.
The growing importance of a limited number of large technology companies that enable billions of users across the world to navigate and use digital media in easy and attractive ways through services like search, social networking, video sharing, messaging, etc. and who as a consequence play a more and more important role in terms of (a) the distribution of news and (b) digital advertising.
The development of a high–choice media environment where internet users have access to more and more information in convenient formats and often for free, across a range of increasingly sophisticated personal and mobile devices, and in ways that enable new forms of participation—an environment where those most interested in news embrace these new opportunities to get,

Speed vs. Accuracy

When print was the only medium available to the journalists ample time was available for research, publishing and editing. Indeed, only a few publishers had access to printing press with which to make the product. As mass media progressed, new forms of print and broadcasting appeared, time allowed for journalistic expression shrank. Internet allows news to move at tremendous dispatch limited only by the speed of electron or electromagnetic wave. The immediacy brought by the online environments everyone is a potential publishers, allows for even less care by the journalist and editor. The speed and anonymity provided by the internet can play fast but loose with journalistic ethics and can affect accuracy and credibility.

Accuracy -- to get the facts and context of a story right -- is a fundamental norm of ethical journalism. Inaccurate reporting undermines important news stories and can mislead the public. Accuracy is the indispensable value in journalism and must not be compromised in Cyber Journalism.

Accurate reporting has never been easy, given journalism’s deadline- driven nature. But today, accuracy is further challenged, as news-making adopts the internet medium.

One of the greatest benefits of online journalism is its ability to reach millions of people almost instantaneously. But the pressure to keep news current – online within minutes of an event’s occurrence – can put at risk the accurate reporting of even the most ethically-conscious journalist. Adding to the pressure is the public’s increasing demand to see news as it happens. So it is certainly extremely – and increasingly – challenging. A balance is necessary between speed and accuracy. The public demands it, and so do journalistic codes of ethics. The consequences of disseminating falsehoods can be equally serious as the consequence of delayed news-dissemination.

Trained and multi-skilled reporters

Another challenge towards online journalism is the convergence. Convergence reporters must be trained to report in multiple media. They should be multi skill able to work in a converged media environment. If necessary, a convergence reporter might file a brief for the Web, edit video for television and then write a story for the next day's paper. Convergence reporters often specialize in a single medium, but their

familiarity with other forms of storytelling gives them an edge in today's ever-changing media landscape.

Furthermore, there is so much information available online that it can be difficult working out where to start and where to stop gathering it. With the change to a much broader reliance on the Internet and web for news, it will become increasingly important for journalists to be multi skilled able to work in more than one medium, and preferably in several, in what has become known as a converged media environment.

From gate keeping to gate watching

For a long time, gate keeping has provided a dominant paradigm for journalistic news gathering and news publishing in the mass media, both for journalists’ own conceptualization of their work and for academic studies of this mediation process. In media such as print, radio, and TV, with their inherent structures of available column space, air time, or transmission frequencies, it is necessary to have established mechanisms which keep watch over these gates and select events to be reported according to specific criteria of newsworthiness. Gate keeping is the process by which selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the "gates" of a news medium into the news channels. Lately, however, the effectiveness of gate keeping has been questioned from a number of perspectives: on the one hand, increasingly ‘the practice of journalism is being contaminated from outside. The "fourth estate" is in danger of being overwhelmed by the "fifth estate", the growing number of "PR merchants and spin doctors" influencing the news agenda’ (Turner et al. 2000: 29, following Franklin) and undermining the reliability of the gate keeping process itself. This is also related to the fact that ever since the emergence of 24-hour broadcast news services and even more so since the advent of online news the reporting speed required of news services has also increased steadily, which has made gatekeepers even more likely to rely on prepared material from this ‘fifth estate’ rather than spending time and money on their own, independent research.