VII Role play.

With your group plan a complete TV newscast. Divide into groups to cover each aspect of the news. Include these news segments. Present them to your class.

Headline news

World trouble spot satellite report

On-the-scene crime report

Sports

Weather

Entertainment report

 

Text 10

Internet and Satellite TV change News Media, News Delivery

Satellite television and the expanding power of the internet are not only changing the way news is delivered, but also the perception of what news is and the way journalists do their jobs. These changes are having a profound impact on the news business while at the same time providing societies with more information that can help strengthen freedom, democracy and human rights.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf coast in 2005, devastating New Orleans and wrecking havoc elsewhere in Louisiana and Mississippi, the Knight Ridder news service sprang into action to support one of its subscriber newspapers. Now owned by the McClatchy newspaper chain, Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau helped the storm-devastated Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi get its content on line.

Jim Van Nostrand, who is now senior editor for McClatchy Interactive, describes what happened. “We used audio and video and user-generated content to great effect there. People were able to upload their photos of their houses, upload photos of their neighborhoods, they were able to use message boards to talk neighbors to ask: ‘hey, have you seen my mother or my uncle or my brother?’. I would say at least half of the content that we posted for Hurricane Katrina was stuff you wouldn’t see in print. Message boards, audio, video that sort of thing.”

The power of the internet is increasingly transforming the way newspapers deliver their product – the kind of product they deliver – and their relationship with readers.

Van Nostrand adds, “It allows our readers to intract with us as they have never interacted before. It used to be the old model: ‘we publish the story, people read it’, that is a one-way communication system. Now people can participate in

 

our reporting, they can send us questions, they can send us comments, they can help shape our coverage.”

But with American newspaper circulation declining by as much as two percent a year, the Internet may be a double-edged sword. This is posing some tough challenges, according to Jeffrey Dvorkin of the Committee of concerned Journalists. “We know that as circulation figures decline, as fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers in the United States and even watching or listening to mainstream television and radio, news organizations are trying to think where is the audience going. A lot of audience, certainly the younger audience, is going to the Internet”.

Such rapid spread of information via the internet – and also by satellite television – is having a profound impact on societies. American University journalism professor Christopher Simpson says one effect is to strengthen human rights.

“There are a number of trends associated with this. One of them is, at least, a potentially greater strength for human rights movements, non-governmental groups that type of thing to use the tools that are available to both capture information about peoples’ lives and to broadcast or transmit that information. That means that the silence that surrounds extreme poverty, for example, can be broken more easily than before. The silence that tends to surround police brutality, called by whatever name, tends to be easier to break than previously.”

This is why the Internet is censored in places like China, and reception of satellite television is banned by repressive countries. Yet – as the recent launches of Al-Jazzera International and “France 24” demonstrates- there appears to be a growing global appetite for satellite television services broadcasting news and information.

This expansion of information delivery is a healthy development, say professor Simpson, because it can help foster democracy. “The raw material of democracy, of freedom, of power, is that people understand what is going on around them. They understand what their society is doing, they understand what their rulers are doing. So in order for that to happen at all, they must have information and they must have accurate information.”

While accurate information is the goal, not everything being broadcast or on the Internet is accurate. There also concerns that the quality of the news product may be adversely affected as journalists face growing pressures to rush their material onto websites. The public editor of the New York Times recently raised this question, wondering whether speed can be balanced with completeness.

In the end, traditional media such as newspapers are likely to adapt and survive these technological changes. What is not likely to change is the power of the written word, according to McClatchy’s Jim Van Nostrand. “For all of the things that the Internet offers, it is still a medium of the written word. That is not going to go away. You still need reporters to go out and ask questions and interview people and tell stories. The Internet gives us other tools to tell those stories but the written word isn’t going to go away.” And as long this is true, the growing proliferation of ideas and information will continue.