ALJ301

The shift of people to online media coverage has made everyone able to contribute to news broadcasting. While i believe this is a result more of the improving technology of hand held devices rather than the increase of people’s interest in news, it makes for interesting viewing.

The initial impact of news services asking for the general public to contribute will be the immediate decrease in personal privacy. With everyone now able to tell basically the whole world, why would anyone of note (celebrities etc) do anything at all in open air so to speak. A perfect example is Shane Warne being set up by the Daily Mirror newspaper with two women who invited him back to their house with a camera waiting. It is only a matter of time until here in Australia a high profile footballer is caught with or using drugs.  As well as this invasion of privacy the quality of news reporting will drop significantly, how can a person truly authenticate the vision they are sending into a TV station. I can see networks stopping the general public’s participation because of spam news that is being sent in with an eye to 15 minutes of fame!

The main positive though i can see is the instant live feed of an event occurring. The Collingwood footballer’s debacle of this week shows that newspapers and TV stations move slowly. News broke of further developments after 6pm so TV stations realistically had to wait until the next day to confirm the news, while if the news had come any later newspapers would have had to wait two days to release the correct information to the public.

I think that the general public controlling the news is not the future of journalism, there are too many avenues for people to mislead and lie there way onto TV.