The future of journalism is very bright, and will be very fascinating. As BBC said in our class materials, traditional news is dead. I believe that this is only partly true. While multi-media and interactive news is important for the future of the media, there is still something to be said for a concise explanation and a few pictures in a news article.
In the source I examined, Firestone, by the Guardian, the authors use a multi-media article to discuss a bushfire. I think that it was a very interesting way to display news, with scrolling and viewing information in chapters with moving pictures and videos. Each small section of text is accompanied by a different picture, moving animation or map, helping to visually aid the information the author is trying to get across to us. This is a very important part of the future of social media, as the attention span of the public is only going to further decrease as technology consumes more and more of our time. I personally am still a fan of the traditional news article, and although this multi-media was very cool it feels like more work than I want to put in to see the information. It felt like I had to put in effort to see more of the article, which made me less interested in reading what it had to say.
This type of media feels like an attempt to begin to create ‘news reporting from the future,’ but the more I think about it, the less and less I hope news starts to be covered this way. I am a huge advocate of the concise news article, and I am really hoping that the media is continuing to be covered in that way. I enjoy being able to read a short excerpt and be able to understand everything that I came for, rather than having to search through pictures and videos and other chapters to find the information.
I do think that participatory media coverage is a great idea, and will help people to be more interested in the contents that they are reading. While this is true, I also think that it needs to be implemented with caution, and not overdone. Articles like this one by the Guardian have tried to do too much, causing readers to get lost in all of the different sources and information being thrown at them all at once. It was very interesting at first glance, but then I forgot some of the earlier information after scrolling through different chapters and watching videos and images.
Clearly this technology is far from perfected, but I do not think that they should transition to multi media news alone. I think that in an optimal setting, they will be able to merge this type of multi media news, while still keeping a clear and concise message, allowing people to still get the information they came for, and not get lost in the stuff they dont need.
Thank you for the great class! Auston
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Firestorm: The Story Of the Bushfire At Dunalley
Jon Henley-Laurence Topham-Guardian team-Mustafa Khalili-Francesca Panetta – https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/may/26/firestorm-bushfire-dunalley-holmes-family
Auston Locke's Blog 