The Start of Something New.

I’m going to start with a confession: I’ve never written a blog post before. Until last week, when I started JOUR1111, I’d always assumed that blogs were for interesting people with something interesting to say. And then I suddenly found myself starting a blog and, dare I say it, getting a twitter account, and now it seems that I have to have something interesting to say too.

After wandering around campus trying to find the mythical John Hay building that was conveniently not on the map, I started my second JOUR1111 lecture. Pens and jelly beans in hand, I learnt about the different forms of media, and more specifically, web iterations.

Until only a few years ago, journalism was confined to traditional media forms: radio, newspapers, television and the like. But these media forms are starting to die out, and so are the journalists that cling to them. So in the wake of this media crisis, journalists have started using a new tool: the internet. Their foray into the internet world started at web 1.0, which, as I learnt, was basically just repurposing old media forms for the web. This all stated to change, however, with the advent of social media, and the rise of ‘prod-users’, creating web 2.0. People no longer had to wait on the media to get their news, and citizen journalists started to pop up everywhere. Journalists were taken off their previously untouched platform as the gods of news, and replaced by the people using Facebook and Twitter. But it didn’t stop there. We are now on the verge of a new kind of iteration: web 3.0.

Web 3.0, or the semantic web, is all about making sense of information, and tailoring it for the individual. Want to see a movie, find a cheap dinner and then get home? Web 3.0 will tell you how. Web 3.0 creates hyperlocalisation, meaning that it’ll give you very specific content delivery. But what does this mean for journalism?  It looks like journalism, and the media, are going to have to adapt. Having ‘news my way’, meaning that you only getting news that is relevant and interesting to the individual and targeted advertising are some of the ways in which journalism can find its place in the semantic web. No longer are newspapers and television the way to go. People want news at their fingertips, and they want news that relates directly to them. But this upsurge in internet news has created another problem for journalists: if no one is buying newspapers anymore and web news is the future, how are we going to make a living? Is the internet the death of journalism?

Our friend Rupert would like to think not, so he’s worked very hard to come up with ways to still make a living out of internet journalism. One means of doing this is by subscriptions. The Times is currently trying this out, with ‘Times+’ giving subscribers extra benefits, in addition to their ordinary news. Also, paywalls have started to come into play, allowing readers to only view a few lines of the story, and if they want to see the rest, they have to sign up. Only time will tell what will become of journalism, but it’s definitely taking some very new and interesting turns. You know it’s an exciting time to get into journalism when the news makers are starting to become the news.