Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message” (cited in Postman, 1986, p. 8). Neil Postman went on to say that “the medium is the metaphor” (Postman, 1986, p. 3). And Couldry (2008) said that messages are becoming mediatized. That is to say that the messages are being adapted or created based upon their preferred medium. These ideas could be said to be the predecessor of Daniels’s (2009) qualitative research on convergence. He sought to determine if convergence is affecting the quality of journalism. His theoretical assumptions were based on McManus’s (1994) market-driven journalism theory and Tuggle, Carr, and Huffmann’s (2007) seven levels of convergence. The findings indicated that a few areas of journalism are significantly affected by convergence. Specifically, enterprise reporting saw a significant advantage from the converged resources. Also, Daniels found that convergence efforts had not achieved some of the highest levels of convergence on a regular basis. The seventh level of convergence was never reached in the case-study (Daniels, 2009). I think this indicates a few things. It indicates that the print, web and TV newsrooms are still not working collaboratively. As Filak (2009) noted, there is a cultural divide separating these staffs. This is likely to create challenges in the years to come. It also says that there is some mediatization of the message. The message is gaining from the insights of personnel from different media trying to adapt the message for each platform. This is likely an upside for converged journalism.
Intertextual media is the future of journalism. Messages delivered in multiple formats and that is easy to access is what the audience desires. Young audiences are already demanding news in multiple formats without a subscription. The subscription and the barriers to access put hardcopy newspapers at a significant disadvantage. Also, young audiences are dissatisfied with the quality of television news (Huang, 2009). News presentations in the future will need to draw on multiple skills to develop online stories that engage many readers’ preferences. Concise writing, video elements, and embedded hyperlinks will be a requirement for most stories.
Headline writing is another key to this equation. Without effective headlines young readers will likely not click on a story (Huang, 2009). And these are the audience of the future. Also, search engines might miss a story without an effective headline (Briggs, 2010). This is to say that headline writing will likely become more mediatized in the future. Clever headline writing might become a skill of the past or it may be secluded to a few niche websites. Search engine optimization (SEO) will make many dramatic changes in the next few years as online journalists try to balance between effective storytelling and attracting an audience (Briggs, 2010).
Another change that will probably be the future of journalism is geolocated content. Metadata attached to online content will allows users to access information based upon their location (Clark, 2010). Sorting data by location should be a convenient way for users to sort through the clutter and find relevant content. It will also contributed to the feeling of hyperlocal content. I believe that hyperlocal content is the future of journalism. Media users have often reported that the stories they read or see are not relevant to them. Hyperlocal content will likely relieve this disconnect with the audience.
References
Briggs, M. (2010). JournalismNext. Washington: CQPress.
Clark, K. (2010). Journalism on the map: A case for location-aware storytelling. Retrieved November 5, 2010, from http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitemprint.aspx?id=102425
Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 373-391. doi: 10.1177/14614444808089414
Daniels, G. L. (2009). On linkages and levels: Using theory to assess the effect of converged structured on news products. In A. E. Grant & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Understanding media convergence : the state of the field (pp. 164-181). New York: Oxford University Press.
Filak, V. F. (2009). Culture, conflict, and convergence: A theoretical discussion of group-based identity and bias reduction in a converged newsroom. In A. E. Grant & J. Wilkinson (Eds.), Understanding media convergence : the state of the field (pp. 117-134). New York: Oxford University Press.
Huang, E. (2009). The causes of youths’ low news consumption and strategies for making youths happy news consumers. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15(1), 105-122. doi: 10.1177/1353856508097021
McManus, J. H. (1994). Market-driven journalism: Let the citizen beware? Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Postman, N. (1986). Amusing ourselves to death. London: Penguin Books.
Tuggle, C. A., Carr, F., & Huffman, S. (2007). Broadcast news handbook: Writing, reporting and producing in a converging media world (Vol. 3rd ed). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Derik, you did a good job of summing up Daniels’ article about market-driven journalism and whether convergence was improving the quality of news coverage. You say, “Intertextual media is the future of journalism,” and I think you’re right, but I hope the baby doesn’t get tossed out with the bathwater of print newspapers.
Just because a story is presented in multiple formats with lots of hyperlinks doesn’t make it a good story. A multi-platform presentation about Lindsey Lohan’s latest escapade in court, for example, would still be a trivial story about an out-of-control celebrity. I hope journalists will continue to produce well-written and well-presented stories about events and issues that truly affect people’s lives. But will enough of a market exist for those kinds of stories? As a society, we are all so entranced with entertainment. We don’t tolerate stories we consider boring. And many of us aren’t willing to invest the time to get into a story unless we get something concrete out of it.
You also say “headline writing will likely become more mediatized in the future. Clever headline writing might become a skill of the past or it may be secluded to a few niche websites.” Again, I think you’re right, but it makes me sad. I was a headline writer for almost a decade and won many awards for my clever headlines. I really hate to see that skill lost, because clever and engaging headlines can lure people into reading stories.