4802 - Flash journalism

Since McAdam's book on Flash Journalism, technology, particularly web-based technology has continued to develop at a rapid rate. While everything McAdams talks about, for example infographics and web packages are still relevant and useful for an audience. There are other aspects of technology that have emerged and would be useful for the presentation of journalism. I would like to focus on web packages because while they are a great resource for audiences, I think a lot could be done to make improve them and make them more diverse.

Twitter is a website which is allows short, timely news to be delivered straight to your phone or computer - this was first globally seen during the Hudson river plane crash, when that story actually broke over twitter and I think it is a vital component that will be really heavily used in news journalism in the future - so far organizations like CNN have breaking news twitter pages which allow users to stay up-to-date with breaking news wherever they are. I think this could be an interesting new component to web packages and would be especially affective for ongoing stories, organizations could create twitter pages especially for particular stories so users can access particular stories wherever they are.

I also think the use of blogs should be used more. Blogging is a great way to gauge opinions and social feeling over current events, while blogging can provide extremist points of view that may not necessarily represent a majority of people - I think it is important for as many points of view to be communicated, so another aspect of the web package could be external links so readers can either read a little deeper into the story or can gather multiple perspectives of what is happening.

And, lastly the emergence of mobile journalism. With devices like the iPhone becoming more common, it's becoming easier to capture video, photos and audio all in a much higher quality than what we have seen. Mobile journalism is not necessarily new, a lot of the footage from 9/11 was taken by "citizen journalists" of sorts, but I don't think it is being used to the extent it could be. While citizen journalism can in no way replace professional journalists, they can contribute to stories, by doing this we get a "real world" perspective of sorts and it also allows the audience to perhaps become more emotionally involved with a story or event.