Nowadays, the content of Internet is all about sharing. So what do we need to do to share? The answer is to participate. Everyone can be a content provider because of technology.
I remember I last month interviewed a senior reporter, Jason Whitely, from WFAA. I asked him about the increased audience participation in broadcast journalism. He told me that audience and professional journalists are now interactively connected. Just like what Henry Jenkins mentions “rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules” (Jenkins, 3).
So how are they interactively connected? Whitely said that in 1990s, audiences had to call or mail a letter to the journalists. Today, due to the mobile-device technology, the audience can send email or send a Twitter tweet to the journalists anytime. They can provide a good story and update the latest situation to the journalists anytime. Simultaneously, broadcast journalists used to finish their featured news before 5pm, 6pm, and 10pm deadline. Today, as long as the broadcast journalists finish their feature story, it goes online. And the broadcast journalists will immediately upload it on their station webpage, Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube. So the audiences no longer need to wait for the traditional 5pm, 6pm, and 10pm newscast.
Perhaps, the television has turned to a new leaf. That is what Jenkins mentions in Convergence Culture, “With the aid of the Internet, the loftiest dream for television is being realized: an odd brand of interactivity. Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to consumers, but that street is now becoming two-way” (Jenkins, 256). The participants (audiences) take as an active role now. And it means the media producers are going to involve in a challenging and fast-changing environment.
Tags: audience, EMAC6300, journalists, newscast, participation
November 30, 2010 at 12:57 pm |
I’m not sure this interactivity is really the dream of television. It seems that the news networks are pretty happy with the amount of control they have over the information they broadcast to their audience. In fact when someone comes along, like Wikilinks, and tells everybody that most broadcast news didn’t tell the whole story, those new corp get mad. I’m not sure if the anger is jealousy related or about control, either way they don’t care for it.
December 1, 2010 at 1:09 am |
Some news networks even request information and pictures from their viewers. My dad watches the 10 pm news before he goes to bed every night, so occasionally I’ll catch it, and I always feel like they are asking viewers to send in pics of that weather event or if they have newsworthy stories to send them in. Perhaps this is a way for the television journalists to stay relevant to viewers?