Internet and Its Impact on Modern-Day Journalism

Let’s be honest; we live in the fast lane these days. We want our food delivered to us fast. We want our money delivered to us fast. Our tasks are done effortlessly and seamlessly. If it’s not digital and not fast, then most of us don’t even want it. This subtle-yet-aggressive demand has resulted in the demise of the newspaper in recent years and apps like Google, Bling, Yahoo, or anything that gives you your required info in seconds have taken over. Let’s dig into how digitalization has revolutionized journalism and how to best make use of this.

Ease of Access

First and foremost, it’s easy. Plain and simple. With newspapers, for example, you’d have to flip through and skim and scan pages to get to your required information. This would take time and lots of attempts to search through a plethora of stuff. Not to mention squinting your eyes to spot a certain niche. Even if it took a hot minute, people today don’t have that sort of time. As a much faster, simpler solution, Google News and other internet-based news applications offer news, headlines, and general information that are tailored to your needs and wants. With smart algorithms and machine learning, it’s almost always a guarantee that you’ll find exactly the content you are thinking about or want to look up. 

Faster Results

As long as you have an internet speed that’s making your search results snappy, you would probably never go back to newspapers, no matter how good content they pack. CenturyLink internet speed enables you to keep up with the latest and greatest by providing you with blistering fast search engine updates. 4g speeds as well as the newly introduced 5g ones are ample enough to display results on your digital screen in the blink of an eye along with colorful text and media to please your senses and thus, psychologically, also rope you in. And as the generations progress, this snappy requirement will further be asked to shorten.

Digital Journalism

It’s one thing to stick to news journalism that makes use of news channels; radiating information to people who want to sit through the entire newsreel and absorb generalized and niche-specific information for the entire duration. And it’s another thing, especially for journalists, to make their own YouTube channel and relay their information and journalism through the internet and on popular platforms like YouTube. What this does is that it helps create a diaspora of people who want information from that specific journalist. This empowers the individual who is presenting the info. They earn revenue based on their views, likes, and subscriptions and if they get enough following, they can even set it up as their main cash inflow stream. Resulting in the journalist having the option of going fully digital and not having to link themselves with a journalism company. Digital journalism is powerful enough to allow a separate entity/individual to earn their bread and butter solely by themselves. 

Authority over Information Absorption

There’s always a certain transparency barrier when it comes to mainstream media. News channels and the like have to keep their content relevant to the barriers set forth by concerned authorities. If not, this results in penalties, fines, and even bans which can hurt the company and its employees. Hence, there’s always a certain level of downsizing to news that we absorb on news channels. Sometimes, certain governments can also play a part in this. Sometimes, even, there’s additional news that is emphasized other news just to get powerful authorities in the limelight. There is always bias that sways the information relayed. However, with media outlets like YouTube, there is no issue with this because the web is not answerable to a certain region. There’s a reason it is called the World Wide Web. Once a journalist has uploaded their video pertaining to a specific niche on the web, perhaps on YouTube, only the platform’s concerned authorities have the liberty to take it down or play with it. Governments and authorities can always request the video to be altered or taken down but this request, almost always, goes through a neutral authority which then handles the situation. Keeping this in mind, users can enjoy a bias-free and likely 100% transparency with the information they’d like from the individual they choose to watch and listen to.

Conclusion

With the entire world going through a paradigm shift of sorts in the now and future, the media is bound to change with it. Newspapers, although juggernauts of the age of paper, are now redundant. One must realize that the age of technology does not allow such mediums to survive unless they are kept as trinkets for an age long past. Perhaps, in the next age, they might gain their relevance if they were to be integrated with holo-projection or smart glasses, etc. But for now, modern-day journalism is in the hands of apps and digital gizmos and gadgets.