By Arvind Nair
JOURNALISM has evolved rapidly and will change immensely over the coming years with the public increasingly participating in providing news because of technology.
This was the shared sentiment of speakers and panelists who participated in ‘Media Connected: an ICT Forum for Journalists’, hosted by the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR, yesterday.
Nearly 200 journalists, communications professionals and students, took part in the forum which brought together leading journalists and media experts from the region and around the world.
It addressed the latest trends in information and communication technology and what they meant for the future of journalism.
Speaking at the event were Tom Standage, business editor at The Economist and Leonard Brody, co-founder and CEO of NowPublic, a rapidly growing media company based on citizen-generated news.
Richard Roth, senior associate dean for journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar moderated a panel discussion that addressed the impact of new media – blogs, citizen journalism, and social networking on journalism.
Participating in the panel were Jawad Abassi, founder and general manager of Arab Advisors Group; Mohamed Nanabhay, head of new media at Al Jazeera Network; Ali al-Shawaf, senior broadcast journalist, BBC Arabic; and Ahmed Ashour, co-founder of Al-Jazeera Talk.
“The future of journalism will involve the audience much more, as sources of information and as participants in the news-gathering operations” Roth said. “When every cell phone can capture photographs, video and audio, it virtually assures that every event on earth will be recorded by someone, somewhere.
“Journalism will be more robust because of it; neither blogs nor millions of individual Web sites will eliminate the great media brands of our day. It seems likely that we will get news principally on cell phones for breaking news and on the Web for depth, but who knows what technology might come along in a year or two,” said Roth.
Standage pointed out that two big stories in the past 15 years had made tech journalism more important than ever: the rise of Internet and the spread of mobile phones. The Internet has affected almost every aspect of human life: business, politics and social life. “It has changed journalism too”.
Many early debates have been resolved, and real-world laws and rules have largely been imposed on the Internet. “It is understood that carriers and ISPs are not responsible for their users’ actions”.
However, there were still some unresolved debates over the Internet. They included net neutrality, behavioural targeting and terrorists using facilities like Google Earth. Blaming Google Earth for its use to terrorists is like terming a clock as a terror tool as it could be used to trigger off a bomb, Standage said.
Mobile phones have affected more people than the Internet since they provide access for the first time to many people. The phones could also have an impact on economic activity, he said. For instance, in Afghanistan, a person could avoid travelling a long distance to a shop by calling the shop-keeper in advance to know if the shop was open or a certain commodity was available.
Similarly, in Kerala, fishermen could call nearby markets from the sea to find out the price and requirement and go there directly instead of moving from one market to another and thereby getting the fish spoiled.
Leonard J Broady of NowPublic, a pioneer in citizen generated news, said people had changed from being observers to participants in journalism. The trend started with the tsunami when the first pictures of the tragedy were taken and disseminated by ordinary citizens.
“People cover news themselves,” he said, pointing out that the recent incident of a plane landing on Hudson river was first reported by a blogger.
However, he stressed that there was a fundamental difference between a journalist and an eye-witness report. A journalist had to analyse the news.
He said Facebook, the social networking site, was one of the most important events in the last 10 years. |
