Journalism is an ever evolving and developing practice.
As such, journalists as practitioners must be able to change and grow with the industry. Journalists must be able to absorb their environment and be in tune with the human experience.
In her article, Sue Schardt, discusses the increases in “technological ingenuity” that is “opening space for new social and digital narrative forms. In the piece produced for Neiman Labs, Schardt expresses how there are new and innovative platforms that are being created daily for access to this new technological world.
It is this change that is pushing journalists to strive harder to find stories that can be adapted to be shared across all “formats, technologies and platforms”.
Not only is it this, but also a journalists observation that is crucial to finding new and creative stories that people can access. Through this act of greater observation, readers can connect on all platforms, digital and otherwise, to the story of a human interest and experience that is being told.
Not too dissimilarly from Schardt, Nathalie Malinarich puts forward, in her own article for Neiman Labs, the heavy importance on evolving technology.
Malinarich is acutely aware of and acknowledges how human instinct is becoming one of extreme dependence on our technology. She observes that “from the moment they wake to the moment they go to sleep, most people check their phones incessantly.
Not only does this article acknowledge the consistency of people’s technological usage, but it then goes on to highlight how users are being told much of what they are seeing is untrustworthy.
Not only this, but people like what is easy, they want to be able to see a news article on their phones, click on it and be taken straight to the page – no fuss.
So when there are factors such as “too many taps, too cryptic a headline, too slow to load, too difficult to read” – readers become disinterested.
It is the role of the journalist in 2017, to make our articles easy to find, easy to open and with text that is neither too small nor too big for our audiences. The fundamental formatting is important when we are considering the platforms that we are reaching readers/viewers from.
Journalism is a service, and as such, we much cater to those we are serving. Today this means adapting to technological advancements to create content that is easy consumed.
It would seem that in 2017 journalism practice must find a way to guarantee its objectivity and truthfulness, whilst staying true to the human interest experience of the audiences consuming the news.
(Image supplied by Pixabay)
