New Technology and Journalism

New Technology and Journalism

The popularity of portable MP3 players has forced broadcast journalists to consider an audience that may not listen to the radio or watch television.

Much like the VCR and TiVo (personal favorite), portable MP3 players allow users to record, or in this case download, files from their computers to take with them to the track, in the car, or wherever they wish to go. Unfortunately for journalists, this means a narrowed audience within earshot when the news segments air.

However, enterprising journalists can save their broadcasts as MP3 files and make them accessible through their websites. This does not solve the timeliness problem, but people who want news will have the facts available whenever they get around to listening. Quick scans of CNN, MSNBC, PBS and NPR did not turn up easily identifiable MP3 download areas. Although NPR did have links to listen to an hourly report or 24-hour coverage a bit down the page.

This raises questions for print journalists as well. Let's say there is a mother of three who reads the newspaper in her car every day while she waits in the carpool lane for her children leave school. She gets her news once a day, late in the day, and doesn't feel she's missing much. If she were to download newscasts to her iPod on her way out the door, she could listen to them while driving and free her carpool lane time for other ventures. Of course this is totally hypothetical, but enough situations like hers and newspaper readership could further drop. But if newspapers integrated sound and embraced the tech., they would probably reach more people than they currently do. Again, not there yet.

If Apple's move to Intel chips produces a video iPod, television news programs will be faced with the same choices: adapt to the tech. or lose viewers. I doubt they would take as long to adapt, though. Since their format is already video, the inclusion of mobile video devices would be more a matter of legality than incompatibility. The HP iPaq h6315 PDA phone already has the ability to record and playback sounds and to view images and text via wifi, it's not huge leap to dedicate a portable device for digital video.

Whatever happens in this evolutionary merge of journalism and technology, move forward or die seems to fit the situation. (Or at least move forward or get really, really sick and become less productive and therefore less influential...)