The New Newsroom Flow
In a recent article on the Forbes website, Lewis DVorkin paints a picture of the evident dichotomy between traditional Newsrooms and the emergence of New Media Newsrooms. In his article titled, “9 big steps in 9 short months, now Forbes is building The New Newsroom,”Lewis points out that,
The Web and social media turned everything upside down. Knowledgeable content creators, audience members and marketers, too, now possess tools to independently produce and distribute text, photos and video that is then shared, “followed” and commented on across the digital landscape.
From the image that began this post (The New Newsroom) we find that the entire process of telling the News is now matter of context and analysis.The very positions involved with the “Flow of the News” essentially revolve around making content smarter and understanding it’s success through monitoring. This is a radical shift in the world of storytelling as it puts a greater level of responsibility onto the shoulders of the Newsroom to validate its performance.
It is my contention that, when the WSJ states that “People simply don’t read as much anymore” and that the bankruptcy of Borders Books is evidence of this, there is a larger transformation that is not being addressed. People, especially my age, are reading less because they no longer have to. It is absolutely the case that in my life I read only a fraction of what I used to in High School and College. Instead, I am, along with my peers, watching, listening and creating the replacement to the written word, media. However, this isn’t the media from 1960.
The media that we are creating is interactive and feedback is immediate.
Writing as a Technology
YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are truly replacing emails and hand written letters as the foremost medium of communication for my generation. Why would we write a letter when we can shoot a video and share an unprecedented level of connectedness with complete ease? In my mind, the action of reading is to share and express an idea through time and over space. Yet media can fulfill this fundamental human need in ways that Johannes Gutenberg never could have imagined. Books were, and to some degree still are, quite good at this. However, the written language is “out of date” when it is compared to newer technologies.
Like cursive, I assume that the hand written letter will become a secondary learning objective for students in the coming decades. Instead of learning how to write a paragraph in English class, students will be learning how to create and share multimedia in their “Futures Class”. I understand the irony of my having written this post with text and your having read it, but understand that what I am describing here is an observation of a slow decay.
Not to Worry
This is not something that anyone should worry about. Instead of spending energy fighting against something that is already here and isn’t going away, we should be embracing these changes. “User Generated Content” is what we are calling the first stages of the (r)evolution of laymen communications. People are now empowered to communicate as if they were in the presence of a crowd from their computers. These are incredibly exciting times and I am looking forward to the next decade of innovation.
