Internet Journalism - A cause of the Slow Death of Traditional News Media?

The days that we no longer make use of newspaper and television as the only source of news, doesn't seem as far fetched in the future anymore. With internet and services like blogs and social networking sites, the news readers are also slowly becoming the news reporters as well! We don't don't even have to wait for an hour before we are hit with the latest (in the true sense of the word) news on the blogs. People who happened to be or live in the neighborhood where the "news-worthy" event takes place have the ability to report them as soon as they take place. And they do use this power to spread this news. For example, the attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, last year. The news of the attack spread like wild fire. People witnessing the attack live, were quick at reporting it with every detail, for the benefit of those who were at a distance. Even videos of the happenings and shootings were up on the blogs, in mere seconds of them happening!

Isn't it amazing what power has the internet endowed us all with? The developments in the field of internet technology has facilitated all social activities and others to become a to-way process with the user required to actively participate in the process. And even journalism has failed to prove itself an exception in the case.

I found an interesting and similar to above mentioned view on internet Journalism. Here it is for you all to read:-

As the old song says, “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and the Internet is killing journalists, or at least news organizations like newspapers and television news shows that no longer provide the same value to their customers.

Journalists are seeing their career paths die right before their eyes. There are even websites like Newspaper Death Watch and a Google Maps project that tracks job layoffs at newspapers across the United States. November marks seven consecutive quarters of declining advertising revenue for U.S. newspapers.

How Did Journalism Get Here?

Journalism started dying when people stopped looking to newspapers and television for news. It is as simple as that. Mindy McAdams, the current Knight Chair for Journalism, recalls that in 1995 people turned to television for coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, but by 2001 public demand crashed CNN’s online servers in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.

The Internet has slowly, but surely taken over the role of “see it here first” journalism. Even 24-hour news stations like CNN, MSNBC and FOX News do not have the ability to show news as it happens anywhere in the world. The Internet does.

The All-Powerful Internet!

It is completely true that we all have stopped turning towards Newspapers and Television for our daily dose of news. Like mentioned above, even though 24-hour news stations can't telecast news as and when it happens the internet does. Hence, even these news stations as well as newpaper publication companies have jumped on the internet bandwagon and now have an online version.

These traditional news companies starting an online version, has also added another point to the list of advantages of internet journalism. Now we can view, international news as well as news from the local news firm. Like my father gets to read the Times of India online whenever he feels like it, here in Singapore, which would have not been possible without the internet.

Another point to be noted is what the future seem to hold for us when it comes to online news? What with the introduction of technologies such as the amazon Kindle and the latest product by apple, the iPad.

Amazon Kindle

iPad

In spite of all the powers of the internet, many people still read news-papers and watch television. But as Amazon kindle and iPad become more and more popular, there is a strong possibility of the traditional news media becoming completely obscure! It wouldn't be surprising if in the future we find ourselves completely without news-papers!

References:

http://newspaper-journalism.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_the_internet_killed_traditional_journalism

Internet Politics- Not a new Phenomenon!

The use of internet for political purposes, even though seems like a very recent development, surprisingly is not so new! Well as a matter of fact politicians, especially American politicians have been using it for quite some time now.

Here is an article related to this topic. It was published by the Washington Post on the 2nd of April 2006.

Politics Faces Sweeping Change via the Web

The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating with the approach of the 2006 Congressional and 2008 White House elections, prompting the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information.

Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for a rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.

Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.

Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.

President Bush's media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still critical to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters that it was even two years ago.

"I feel like a woolly mammoth," Mr. McKinnon said.

What the parties and the candidates are undergoing now is in many ways similar to what has happened in other sectors of the nation — including the music industry, newspapers and retailing — as they try to adjust to, and take advantage of, the Internet as its influence spreads across American society. To a considerable extent, they are responding to, and playing catch up with, bloggers who have demonstrated the power of their forums to harness the energy on both sides of the ideological divide.

Certainly, the Internet was a significant factor in 2004, particularly with the early success in fund-raising and organizing by Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender. But officials in both parties say the extent to which the parties have now recognized and rely on the Internet has increased at a staggering rate over the past two years.

The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans.

This means, aides said, rethinking every assumption about running a campaign: how to reach different segments of voters, how to get voters to the polls, how to raise money, and the best way to have a candidate interact with the public. In 2004, John Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina and his party's vice presidential candidate, spent much of his time talking to voters in living rooms in New Hampshire and Iowa; now he is putting aside hours every week to videotape responses to videotaped questions, the entire exchange posted on his blog.

"The effect of the Internet on politics will be every bit as transformational as television was," said Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. "If you want to get your message out, the old way of paying someone to make a TV ad is insufficient: You need your message out through the Internet, through e-mail, through talk radio."

Michael Cornfield, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies politics and the Internet, said campaigns were actually late in coming to the game. "Politicians are having a hard time reconciling themselves to a medium where they can't control the message," Professor Cornfield said. "Politics is lagging, but politics is not going to be immune to the digital revolution."

If there was any resistance, it is rapidly melting away.

Mark Warner, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, began preparing for a potential 2008 presidential campaign by hiring a blogging pioneer, Jerome Armstrong, a noteworthy addition to the usual first-wave of presidential campaign hiring of political consultants and fund-raisers. .......

There is more to this particular article, for those of you who are interested in reading the complete article visit the following website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/washington/02campaign.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The point that I intended to make by putting up this article was that if in 2006, so many of the internet's features were put to use by politicians, then we can only imagine the scope for politics using the internet today.

Entertainment and Multimedia on the I...

NewsML – a XML language for the news industry

NewsML is a method/standard developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) for packaging, relating, and managing diverse pieces of media. Currently, a second generation of this standard is under development under the name NewsML 2 Architecture (NAR). The basic goal of NAR is to provide a single generic model for exchanging all kinds of newsworthy information, thus providing a framework for a future family of IPTC news exchange standards.

The IPTC also maintains a number of controlled vocabularies, calledNewsCodes, that are used to annotate news items. These vocabularies are publicly available and used by IPTC members as well as third parties.

News customers can process NewsML packages with low-level, generic XML tools and libraries like the Simple API for XML (SAX), the Document Object Model (DOM), and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), but the large feature set of the NewsML format can make the work difficult, especially if an XML specialist is not available. The Java-based NewsML Toolkit, jointly developed by the Reuters Group PLC in the U.K. and Wavo Corporation, Inc. in the U.S., provides a simple interface that lets you perform the most important NewsML processing tasks without any knowledge of XML or the intricacies of NewsML markup.

Java developers with no prior XML knowledge can use the NewsML Toolkit to extract many kinds of information from a multimedia NewsML package, including news lines, permissions, dates, whether a story is embargoed, and where to find the individual news objects, all using regular Java object methods. The first release of the library also includes a simple demonstration application, the NewsML Explorer, for browsing NewsML packages interactively.

For advanced users who need access to information not provided directly by the first alpha release of the library (such as full metadata support or incremental updates), the NewsML Toolkit allows direct access to the full original markup through a DOM interface whenever needed.

Features and Benefits of NewsML

The NewsML Toolkit is implemented in Java and should run on any platform with a Java2-compliant virtual machine, including (but not limited to) Unix, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 95/98, and MacOS. To date, the library has been tested under Linux and Windows.

The NewsML Toolkit and the NewsML Explorer application are both Open Source: freely redistributable, with source code included. The library's license allows it to be incorporated into commercial software packages royalty-free, as long as any modifications or improvements to the library itself are released back to the public. A shared, vendor-friendly open-source library makes it possible for NewsML developers to concentrate on innovation rather than writing basic NewsML processing code over and over again and losing weeks or months tracking down the resulting bugs.

The NewsML Toolkit works with the industry-standard DOM standard for XML processing, and will work with any conformant Java-based DOM library: if you have already assembled an XML toolkit that you're happy with, you do not have to throw it away. While the initial NewsML Toolkit release concentrates on presenting the most important information as simply as possible, the full XML markup is always available through the DOM whenever needed.

The NewsML Toolkit will save developers time and money, by allowing non-XML-specialists to develop NewsML-based applications quickly and easily.

Components of a NewsML Toolkit

The NewsML Toolkit contains many classes to represent the different kinds of information that can be present in a NewsML package, but most NewsML work is based on five key classes:

NewsML:- This class represents the top-level NewsML package, containing one or more NewsItem objects. The top-level package also includes envelope information for routing.

NewsItem:- This class represents a managed set of news information, containing a single NewsComponent. The NewsItem also contains identification and management information.

NewsComponent:- This class represents a collection of related items, either complements or equivalent versions of the same news object in different formats, resolutions, languages, and so on. A NewsComponent includes one or more NewsItems or NewsItemRefs, NewsComponents, or ContentItems, and also includes news lines (headline, byline, and so on) and metadata describing the news objects.

NewsItemRef:- This class represents a reference to another NewsItem, either inside or outside the current NewsML package.

ContentItem:- This class represents a piece of actual news content for presentation to humans, either stored inline or available through an external URL reference.

The following figure provides a visual representation of the structure of a typical object tree in the NewsML Toolkit:

References:

http://newsml.cwi.nl/

http://about.reuters.com/researchandstandards/firstcontact/newsml-toolkit/