New media journalism, including chat rooms, blogs, news sites, and podcasts, has grown rapidly due to technological advances and dissatisfaction with traditional media. These sites often have agendas and compete with traditional media, but some traditional journalists have moved to new media.
Early on, media journalism was an auctioneer’s province. Later came the newspapers, followed by television and radio. These last three places of communication – the town criers fell by the wayside around the time Gutenberg invented printing – held a virtual monopoly on media journalism until the creation of the Internet. The resulting chat rooms, blogs, news sites, personal websites, podcasts, and video opportunities offered both news and opinion from both individuals and experts. The result has come to be known as new media journalism.
The meteoric rise of new media journalism may have been driven primarily by technological advances, but a general dissatisfaction with existing forms of journalism also played a part. Sometimes traditional media journalists have lived up to their own standards of neutral and impartial reporting, other times they haven’t. In the last quarter of the 20th century, probably in an effort to boost profits, the lines between traditional media journalism, advertising, entertainment, and agenda-driven reporting became quite blurred. New media journalism – reporting and opinion provided by what is often called “citizen journalism” – has exploded in type, number and popularity.
A number of websites specializing in new media journalism have grown so large and popular that they have become viable competitors to traditional media. New media journalist websites tend to be agenda-oriented. For example, major industry players like The Drudge Report are geared towards audiences with conservative leanings, while sites like The Huffington Post strive to reach a more liberal audience. The difference between these new media journalists and traditional media journalists is that the former usually do not pretend to be impartial. The reader knows what he or she is getting before the fact, and therefore can peruse a variety of different offerings and make their own distinctions between fact and opinion.
The owners of traditional media groups, as well as the journalists and broadcasters who worked for those organizations, initially tended to dismiss bloggers and other new media journalists as unprofessional. This scenario changed when many traditional journalists, dissatisfied with the tight restrictions on coverage and content they had previously worked with, moved into the world of new media journalism. Although it took a few years for the mainstream press to bend over to the inevitable, many traditional media outlets now utilize the myriad possibilities of new media journalism to get their message out to the public.
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