The incredibly rapid development of American journalism has brought the United States a long way since the days of paperboys in street corners. American journalism is currently in a transformational phase, which culminates the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions and ushers in an era in which the gathering and distribution of news is much more widespread and accessible.
The next big technological innovation that is affecting journalism is the Internet. The term “digital media” refers to the product of entities such as bloggers, public broadcasting stations and university-run news services. Together, they are creating a greater variety of independent reporting, but also a different definition of news. Although there seems to be a newfound market for small independent reporting to develop, I am inclined to think that there is certainly something to gain when there are stable organizations that work collaboratively to produce quality reporting, investigations and analysis. This is why for me; the rise of “e-news” just makes it more up to the readers to surf through several sources in order to obtain actual facts. Not only that, there is a challenge to finding news articles relevant to myself as I surf the web. It seems that webpages that often become people’s homepages for news such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL and even those that focus on a specific category such as ESPN for sports and CNN for politics are driven to social media as a measuring device for news popularity and interactions with the public. Ultimately, news is becoming more of a personal scavenger hunt rather than a narrow stream of news where everyone drinks the same thing. I am very eager to witness the long term effects the Internet will have on American journalism.