The increasingly advance in technology, benefited most of the public by providing them an additional arms and legs to perform stuffs through their desktop, laptop and even through their smartphones.
With these smart and portable gadgets, people are able to access to the latest news ever now and then. And with the varies functions on their gadgets; like camera and video function, too empowered the people to contribute to journalism.
The advancement in technology, thus meant that journalists are required to multitask, which led to the rise of a multi-media journalist. a multi-media journalist is a reporter, who is required to provide content for print, online, radio and often television who is also called the ‘super-reporter’ who is able to cover a story for every medium.
An online journalist is the most prominent example of a multi-media reporter. However, this platypus journalist is often criticized as “jack of all trades and master of none”, where the multi-skilled journalist would not be able to perform or provide information as well as a mono-skilled journalist in certain media. As the skills needed for a multi-media reporter are visual thinking, audio editing, writing for radio, online, pictures and image editing, and having to at least be able to do the minimum requirement of each skills, have resulted that the multimedia journalism to pick up a skill when he/she is doing their job on site.
Online News does not necessarily meant that the journalists are able to write more, but in fact the number of words is significantly lesser as reading from pc screen is abt 25% slower then on print, thus journalist should never put more content online than the newspaper due to the so-called infinite news hole online. Instead, information offered online should be easily digestible chunks and to remain text focus and keep images small, simple and easily understood message should be employed to help their readers digest stories more easily.
Incidental news consumption describes how audience today get their news from their daily life, thus news provider has to be everywhere all the time, offering the widest practical range of media formats, eg radio when driving, news report on tv when changing channels, headlines of newspaper when walking pass a newspaper booth while walking to the train stations, remarks of news from classmates while waiting lesson to start and etc. which further describes the importance of multi-media journalists.
Ending with a Question, Does technologies advancement do the journalism field any good?
I feel that it may benefited the audience with consumpted news, as with advance technologies, they are able to get their daily news almost everywhere they go with a tap on their favourite smartphone. However, for the journalists, advance technologies simply open up their opportunities in the journalism field (now they can do broadcast, online and maybe even citizen journalism), but, to work well within the field, they are too required to equip themselves with the skills needed to do their job well.
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