Changing media
Ravia Gupta
With the spread of COVID-19, newsrooms are changing the way they function to ensure the continuity of newsrooms core operations and above all ensure safety of their journalists. These are challenging times for any profession and journalism or journalists are no different. Most journalists at present are mobile and are armed with a laptop, mobile phone, enabling freedom to work from almost anywhere, anytime. But considering the growing number of Covid-19 cases the ability of newsrooms to produce content at the expected pace and standard, while ensuring the safety of journalists and newsroom managers needs to be relooked. According to google news initiative newsrooms have to reconfigure as distributed, digital spaces. As an initiative to way forward in response to social distancing policies due to COVID-19 crisis, the google news initiative has designed a playbook to help chart out a sustainable path forward, based on experience and strategic thinking.
The Distributed Press
Think of a newsroom and images of huddles of desks bustling with reporters, editors and producers working to cover day’s events in real-time, surrounded by TV screens flashing breaking updates and the latest analytics is what comes to your mind. But one has to accept the fact that in the recent past change is already visible in the way people connect with each other and receive information.
At present people are socially connected with each other anytime anywhere with the help of Social Networking Sites. Considering this change in the medium, traditional media, too, has to adapt to the change, in order to connect with its audience and expand the reach.
What started by a relatively small number of college students at the beginning of the Century, became a common way for most Americans to spend their free time and the trend seems to not just have caught the Indians fancy but has matured in the recent past. Facebook and Twitter’s Periscope promoted virtual reality (VR) 360-video which became the next wave for social media and by early 2017, Facebook and Facebook Messenger became the top Smartphone apps. Widespread mobile internet access across India and a large and growing number of social media users have led news organizations to invest in social media.
According to theorists Steven Chaffee and Miriam Metzger Internet has brought a decline in the traditional media agenda-setting and a shift is seen in terms of increased access and greater choice post 2001. Besides, as far as Internet penetration in India is concerned it is expected to reach 829 million by 2021. As per McKinsey report, digital is offering opportunities across the board to improve costs and capture new growth. The digital revolution as per the report offered 15 per cent cost reduction as far as Pulp and paper usage is concerned.
Looking back, one can easily say that media ecology has changed several times since the evolution of man, who learned how to communicate effectively and progressed with new innovations. Due to the explosion of convergence process of information technology in the last decades of the 20th Century, pace of change in media ecology has also been phenomenal. According to E-commerce, the Indian e-commerce industry is expected to become the second largest e-commerce market in the world by 2034.
The Changing Media Landscape
The landscape of media environment as we understood so far broadly included two important things physical output and ownership. Mainstream newspapers were grouped as per their political identity and their physical size and broadcast news outlets were recognized as per who owns what. The World Wide Web has blurred all the differences that existed in the physical output of media. The mainstream newspapers are still called as the broadsheets when in reality they are almost the size of a tabloid and the size absolutely doesn’t matter in the digital age when almost most of them have an online presence and accessed through smart phones, tablets, computers etc. Coming online all of them have the same mix of videos, audio, pictures and text.
The technological limitations on the media, the mechanism and scope of distribution are no longer important. What is important however is “what is being said” and “to whom it is being said”, Cook (2013).
As we move closer be a part of the information age, the challenges surrounding the mass communication field seem to be growing. The changes taking place in the media environment are numerous and older approaches to news are being replaced with the “New News”. The term developed by Jon Katz in 1992. One of the most important characteristic of new media environment is the recognition that all information is same and it is digital. William Gibson, science fiction writer, in the novel “Neuromancer” referred to space where electronic communication takes place. Cyberspace in his novel means an alternative world made of masses of information from corporations, military, governments and also individual egos.
The New Media Landscape
According to Servin and Tankard changes in mass communication include two important things. One is the active audience due to newer forms of media like social media and a shift towards cognitive approaches in information processing. This shift according to them is seen in three ways- one a shift from persuasion to discourse and framing, second a shift from attitudes to cognitions such as knowledge and beliefs and third a shift in emphasis from change as a result of communication to restructuring or social construction of reality.
Rapid changes in communication and technology, however, could impact employment, increased information gap, increased gender inequality in use of media, information overload, increased privacy invasion, decentralization of power in society and segmentation of mass audiences.
In the new social and networked environment, output technology is no longer the determining factor of a news organization. Traditional organizations are converging. They are using the same input to produce multiple outputs for multiple audiences. Megan Knight and Clare Cook have proposed a two-dimensional matrix. The matrix indicates the level of engagement and collaboration among organizations and individuals.
It determines a news organization and a journalist based on three factors- the voice, intent and weight or influence. Voice and structure of stories is placed at the vertical axis and intent and influence on the horizontal axis. Traditionally, news making is the process that took events and turned them into recognizable news packages using “third-person objective” voice of the authority. This voice is at the top of vertical axis and at the bottom is the unedited, unverified personal voice of the blogger or tweeter. As one moves down the axis, the news content becomes more personal. Here is the point that calls for journalists to move “beyond objectivity” in order to re-engage with the public.
At the top of the vertical axis, news products were approached with a closed gate keeping but as one moved down the gates open and the difference between a journalist and audience vanishes. Presently, the news landscape is moving down the axis and even the traditional news organization are including live blogs on their websites, incorporating amateur video into their feeds and incorporating comments and feedback in formal and informal ways.
The horizontal axis measures the intent of the news organization with traditional or mainstream media at the far right of the matrix. While moving towards the left, organizations’ focus on news decreases and other concerns like social change and political activism creep in and their production of news is entirely secondary or even accidental.
Shift from Landscape to Ecosystem
According to Logan in 2010 media ecology approach connects all aspects of communication and embraces the study of media, technology and language which form an ecosystem. Traditionally, an ecosystem referred to a biological system consisting of interactions among all constituents of the system including natural physical environment and the living organisms. A media ecosystem, however, is defined as a system consisting of human beings, media and technology through which they interact and communicate with each other. He further added that ecosystems whether they are biological or media-based evolve as their constituents also co-evolve through their interactions with each other.
Megan Knight and Clare Cook have argued that news organizations and individuals can no longer work in isolation from their community and environment. The traditional uni-linear arrangement of information passing from source to journalist and then to audience can no longer work. News organizations and journalists must re-orient towards community which includes sources, audiences and peers in the living ecosystem.
In social-media landscape the individual voice of journalist becomes clear. Journalists find themselves in direct contact with the audiences and find more options regarding their source and output. The need of the hour, however, is to strike a balance between the original news content with that of what is being shared and distributed across multiple online platforms and this could be done in collaboration with news users as the time has come when we must accept that Journalism has become a mass participation activity.
(This is an excerpt from the paper written by the author “Changing Media Ecology and Indian Social Media”)
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