By Sumeet Kaur:
Today’s modern journalist,rather the digital media person, thinks in terms of keywords, trending topics, multimedia tools, better packaging, etc. as compared to their counterpart, the print journalist or the traditional journalist who had to put in a lot of hard work and labour for writing a piece of article and used to focus more on framing the apt headline and labour for days and days to gather facts about a story and rewrite many times on paper before he came up with the final masterpiece. We can very well observe a generation gap in journalism.
For today’s reporter, internet has served to be a blessing in disguise. Internet is helping them tremendously in their research. The online scenario has been successful to a large extent in making the news democratic. The new age journalist is talking to people and getting instant feedback and reviews. They have a fan following and critics at the same time. Social media has eventually made citizen journalism a dream come true. Reporters are actually paying very much attention to user generated content (text,audio,video,etc.) Technology has made the citizen not just consume the news but think more critically about the news that is coming through various sources and and also produce media and post it across via online media for others to judge and analyse.
The challenge for today’s journalist is speed. they have to be active 24*7. As important is the story for the readers, equally important is the speed at which you publish the story and definitely your way of presentation to make it interesting. There are a wide variety of engaging tools available which content teams work on. They need to find out all about how search engines work, website management, better packaging multimedia tools and the site’s interactive elements etc. Reporters are not at all expected to know about the operation process of a printing machine as for them a know-how of latest digital computers and internet technologies is sufficient.
The new age journalist seeks to change the world for the better with their youthful optimism and new technologies. Processes may change, but the fundamentals of journalism’s mission to convey information to the public and to tell stories remains at the heart of every journalist. The qualities of good journalism don’t change much over time, even with shifting media and technology, and for the sake of betterment this thinking has to be adapted by all.