Peter Hirshberg, who has led emerging media and technology companies for more than 25 years, said the internet has changed the way we make and experience nearly all media in just one generation. Gone are the days when journalists bashed their heads against the table after leaving a mistake in their text. Now, they can just click 'Edit' on their news website and get rid of it in a few seconds. The industry has picked up the pace.
"Writers for the blog website Gawker watch real-time web consumption statistics on all of their posts—and they instantly learn how to craft content to best command an audience," Hirshberg wrote. "The head programmer for Fox Television Network similarly has a readout that gives an in-depth analysis of audience behavior, interest, and sentiment. In the run-up to the final episode of the American television drama Breaking Bad, the series was drawing up to 100,000 tweets a day, a clear indication that the audience was as interested in what it had to say as what the producers were creating."
However, the process that happens before a story is published has also transformed. Aleks Krotoski, who has a Ph.D. in the social psychology of relationships in online communities, said the web has become the go-to point for the globe when it comes to getting information, and the same applies to reporters. "Online, they find a multiplicity of perspectives and a library of available knowledge that provides the context for stories. Increasingly, the stories are coming from the web."
Broadly speaking, technology has improved the processes of identifying stories that are newsworthy. Feeds from social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter "provide a snapshot of events happening around the world from the viewpoint of first-hand witnesses, and blogs and citizen news sources offer analytical perspectives from the ground faster than print or television can provide."
Even Paul Mason, the economics editor on BBC2's Newsnight, uses these tools to get an angle on what's happening and what's important. "If you are following 10 key economists on Twitter and some very intelligent blogs, you can quickly get to where you need to be: the stomach-churning question, 'OK, what do I do to move this story on?'" he said.
If you thought at the beginning of this piece that the internet and the ability to change stories even after they're live has made journalists less meticulous, you definitely had a reason to. But maybe that's not the case?
