“READ ALL ABOUT IT READ ALL ABOUT IT” … echoes of the past?

After what has been a rocky week for broadcasting I was less than keen to listen to Matthew Yeomans’ (of Custom Communication) lecture last week when he started off by mentioning that journalism’s traditional models are “falling apart at the seams”. He mentioned that the American based Christian Science Monitor had stopped publishing in a daily print form and would only be producing a website and a weekly magazine, seemingly due to a lack of demand. Matthew Yeomans also quoted a columnist in the New York Times from the 29th of October 2008 suggesting that for journalism “clearly the sky is falling. The question is how many people will be left to cover it”. However, after this he did signal some hope to a room full of potential journalists, and this hope (yes you have probably guessed by now) is in evolving with the Internet.

He could not say where journalism would end up yet said that the traditional rules were changing. This idea is nothing new and appears in many of my previous posts, although Matthew Yeomans did provide a useful three-point summary of the three points that are at play;
1 - Everyone has the Power to Publish thus creating a Global Conversation.
2 - Anyone has the Power to Participate and share their opinions.
3 - All consumers have the Power to Choose the method of their news consumption.

It has certainly been clear in the past few weeks how immediate and influential the Internet and the advances it has created can be. There are two well-known examples for this. My first one is the interview on This Morning with Kerry Katona (broadcast live on the 22nd of October 2008). Kerry Katona’s health was called into question during the interview and was the subject of many media outlets in the following few days. I watched the interview live before walking into university just 20 minutes later; in that time my friends, already at university, had heard about and seen the interview. No one at university had watched the television program; they only had the Internet and saw information appearing on various websites within seconds of the interview. My other example is the message left by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on Andrew Sachs answer-machine. The incident gained a lot of media attention last week and was listened to by many more people than usual as they could access the recording via the BBC website.

Although it is impossible to discern many people would have known about the above examples had there been no Internet it is clear that they would not have been able to access the information and word would not have been able to spread so quickly. I do not however feel that the ages of traditional methods of journalism are dead. Whilst numbers of people buying newspapers may be falling I believe they still will have an influence. I feel traditional media must use the Internet to remain in existence though.