Drink Up, Broadcasters!

This week, the career center hosted a panel of web-based journalists who spoke about their jobs and the future of broadcasting. It was very interesting to hear how they started out in the field at television stations and newspaper offices and ended up where they are today leading the future with technology. One speaker from the Pittsburgh WQED station, made an analogy that really caught my attention. He said that the media is currently going through a “milkman” transition. Think back a few decades, milkmen used to visit the doors of almost every home in America, providing milk to the families weekly. Eventually, the availability of refrigerators and the building of giant supermarkets weeded off the profession of delivering milk because it was now available whenever you needed it. In broadcasting, the “milkmen” are essentially the print journalist and the availability of computers in every American home, and the coming of the “super web” is weeding out the concepts of how we originally received news on a daily basis. Broadcasters now have to branch out and distinguish themselves in order to make a living. Instead of just writing an article and having it published in the daily paper, print journalists are now posting those articles on their papers website with video, graphics and sound. Instead of just producing a package for the evening news, video journalists are now constantly covering news and posting it on their websites to rival the constant media overflow consumers are being flooded with. Anyone with internet can now log onto popular news sites like CNN.com, nytimes.com or usatoday.com instead of having to wait for the 6 or 11 o clock news to know what is going on around them. I am as guilty of clicking to the web for news as anyone else, its convenience and constantly updated sources keep me coming back for more. I think the future of broadcasting is a very interesting and exciting concept, just imagine how different the future could even be from today. What will the web bring us next, and will it consume our lives and how we receive news even more than today? As young journalists, we need to keep on our toes and be ready for anything. More than ever, we need to distinguish ourselves from the media pack and start developing our web savvy selves!