While many people believe journalism to be dying in the modern age, new technology allows journalists to create and distribute important information in hitherto unforeseen ways. The use of cameras and graphics has opened up new plains of reporting for the journalists of today, especially regarding works of multimedia journalism like that seen on the Sydney Morning Herald website following the joint ABC-Fairfax investigation into 7/11 workers (link: http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2015/7-eleven-revealed/). Interactive journalism, incorporating graphics, data, video and even audio alongside the more traditional text allows today’s news to be not only informative, but also thoroughly entertaining to explore. However, the core values of journalism, particularly timeliness, persistence and integrity, must also be maintained- it’s no use giving your hermit crab terrarium a makeover if the crabs themselves have died.
While these new areas still remain connected to core journalistic values such as integrity, independence and persistence (it’s still just as important as ever to ensure our journalism is fair, accurate and balanced), modern technology adds a new dimension to each of them, making it doubly challenging to ensure quality journalism meets appropriate ethics. The persistence required to follow a lead, to push past apparent dead ends and to leave no stone unturned in tracking down the truth is matched by the resilience needed to produce it using complicated, even unfamiliar, technologies.
Additionally, in modern journalism, a common criticism is that journalists waive or speed through fact-checking and other considerations in a desire to “be first”. While timeliness is a key aspect of journalism, and has never been more important with so much competition out there, balancing it with reliability and integrity to ensure the information being delivered is worthwhile, relevant and factual is even more critical. The use of technology in journalism enhances this problem; while print journalism can be compiled relatively quickly once the requisite interviews are completed, adding data and combining multimedia platforms is a challenging business that requires a), professional work across a number of fields including video, audio, graphics and the actual story, and b) compiling it all together to make it convenient to access and view. One risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater if the need to get the story out there becomes more important than ensuring the quality of the story itself.
The changing face of modern journalism brings with it both challenges and windfalls; while new technology opens up hitherto unimaginable doors of communication, these have added to the difficulty of the profession, both in compiling news reports through multimedia journalism and maintaining a strict adherence to the core journalism values that remain crucial even today.
