"Convergence (in online journalism)
1. Combining of media: the internet’s fusion of video, text and sound.
2. Merging of media organisations: a newspaper and a television station can combine their news-gathering resources into a single entity, with journalists producing content for broadcast, print and the internet."
Problems?
If the media is supposed to be forming the fourth estate, whereby it takes on a ‘watchdog’ role over industry, government, etcetera, how will it be able to perform this role in an impartial way? Not only will it have the competing interested of advertisers, it will also have the competing interests of different news organisations and their agendas.
I guess it’s kind of a similar situation to that which commercial news providers are in; they need advertising in order to produce news content, yet does providing this advertising present a bias towards the industries and companies that pay for their commercials to be integrated into or around news content?
This is only a look into one small problem that will occur with convergence. The second of numerous problems is the policy and lawmaking (the details of which I’m shaky on) which apply to broadcasters but as yet don’t apply to internet news agencies regarding content, censorship and many other issues. If television news broadcasters and radio broadcasters are subject to certain rules and regulations, shouldn’t there be similar rules and regulations for internet organisations?
Here’s a great article discussing some of the issues which are arising:
No doubt convergence also has its benefits...
No comments:
Post a Comment