The Profession: Forms of Journalism

Journalism has evolved with the rise of social media over the past few years. People are now able to find the news in any form they want, whether it’s on television, a video clip online, the newspaper, online newspapers, pictures, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. In class, we were given a handout that had three forms of journalism: a Tweet, a blog excerpt, and an excerpt from a New York Times article. Each reported the news of what was going on with the Egyptian protests, but they each told it in a different way. The Tweet was only two fragmented sentences that were simple and to the point; it told exactly what was happening in the most concise way. However, the Tweet only reported one event – it didn’t report on the entire story of the protests. The blog reported the news in a bulleted way. It was a list of quotes (some from unreliable sources) and facts, and it was much more in depth than the Tweet was. It told of many different events that had occurred, instead of just one like the Tweet. The excerpt from The New York Times was written like a story. It was creative and written in a way that readers could see an image of the events in their head.

I think that these different ways of telling the same event is a perfect example of how a person could receive the news in any way that they want. If I only had a second to check the news, I might look at Twitter to get an update of what was going on. If I wanted to get the basic facts of an event, I would want to look at blogs. If I had plenty of time to read the news and a newspaper was available to me, I would read it out of The New York Times or another paper to get a deep and complete coverage of the news. These different forms of the news have allowed more people to find the news in the way they want to receive it. I think many more people know what is going on in the world because they have the choice of reading or getting the news in the way that works best for them.

Lessons Learned in Types and Forms of Journalism:

http://blog.spot.us/2009/04/06/lessons-learned-in-types-and-forms-of-journalism/

New Forms of Journalism Emerge in New Media Ecosystem:

http://www.j-lab.org/about/press_releases/new_forms_of_journalism_emerge_in_new_media_ecosystem/

How Editors View Emerging Forms of Journalism:

http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis//2007/03/2_how_editors_view_emerging_forms_of_jou.php