Journalism and Technology: Plus Ça Change?

Hong Kong.
The next speaker at The Internet Turning 40 is Stuart Allan, who focusses our attention on the history of journalism on the Internet. He highlights the continuing questions of what counts as news, and who can be described as a journalist, in this changing environment, and notes that we have gradually shifted from journalism on the Internet to journalism of the Internet.

But to understand this shift better, it is useful to step back to consider the historical trajectory of journalism both online and in other media - by way of illustration, Stuart notes how over time, TV news bulletins have settled into a format that is now near-universal around the world, and which seems natural to us from life-long exposure, but is far from the only possible approach. Early TV newscasts were strongly influenced by newspaper journalism, of course, and replicated its conventions to some extent; another influence was radio journalism, which was better placed to do current, close to real-time reporting; yet another was newsreel journalism which had the expertise for presenting news stories in visual formats. Today, these have coalesced into a globally near-uniform format, with very few exceptions.

In terms of online news, we still are in a process of experimentation which is influenced by various journalistic traditions from a range of media - but real innovation is gradually becoming more difficult as formats settle into standard patterns. Some key issues have remained the same throughout the years, however (as Stuart demonstrates using a 1981 news report about early online journalism experiments): questions of technology (how is online journalism delivered), profitability (what business model), journalistic form (what kind of content), consumption patterns (what motivations for readers to use it), and interactivity (what do readers do with it) continue as challenges for online journalism today.

A critical historiography of the present, examining current developments in online journalism, Stuart suggests, should focus on world events like the Mumbai attacks or the Iranian presidential elections - to track developments in online news and understand how these events affect the developing understanding of Internet technologies' journalistic potential. This needs to be done as it happens as it would be very difficult to denaturalise those developing understandings of online news after the fact.

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