Data & The future of Journalism
02 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in New media, Research, Technology
Briefly discuss the importance of data to the future of journalism. What role will this play and how can journalists, journalism students and journalism educators prepare for it?
Data is at everyone’s fingertips, especially with the advances of the World Wide Web. These advances can be beneficial to the journalists of today, and the advances of several forms of technology will help the future journalists to be a step ahead. This will also help educators prepare journalists for a future of advanced technology and the availability of any and every kind of data!
The reality is……newspapers are disappearing completely ( for the most part). The web is filled with consumer-generated content EVERYWHERE…… but this does not mean that professional journalists do not have a future. We need them to keep things in order, especially because anyone can put anything on the web (just about)
People want to know what is happening right now, and they want insight into the events taking place. People are concerned with what is going to affect them! What do these events mean to me? How will they affect my world? Because of questions like these…..there is a future for journalists.
News will continue to be commoditized, but news that is specific to the end-user and filled with real-time education will be hard to come by. This will mean that reporters who do most of their work before the event happens. In other words, they know the topic inside and out, and, more importantly, they can get these people to interact and answer questions anytime and anywhere.
Stories will still develop over time, but with the fast paced internet world, a TOP story will be available ASAP and because the web is multimedia, video will be extremely important too. We want to see what is happening, we want to feel like we are a part of the event. So a reporter will have to be able to use a good camera to capture everything at an event.
The world has changed, yes, but at the end of the day, people are still, well, people. They still have a need to know what is going on around them and how it may affect them. With the explosion of Web-based tools and sharing data has created a phenomenon, the benefits and future for journalists is out there to explore! 
-Online Journalism…. something to think about for journalism students and educators preparing these journalists for the scary reality of the world.
Data is CRUCIAL to the future of Journalism, that’s for SURE! I think that in order to prepare for a future fulll of ONLY data, people need to be ready to embrace this advance in technology and learn how to use it to their benefit…. whatever that may be.
With the advances of technology, the teaching practices of journalism educators are going to have to change in order to keep up with this fast paced industry.
