The move to new media and we media

We are quickly seeing the media worlds changing as technologies are created allowing people to access information in ways previously unheard of. We typically think of the media as radio, print, and broadcast journalism. While each of these mediums came about at a different time with different technologies, today they seem to be the foundation of the media.

With the invention and increasing popularity of the Internet, those three mediums are no longer becoming the go to media when a crisis or big news event occurs. Instead, people will turn to the Internet to obtain and gather information but to also disseminate information in the form of pictures, video, audio, and text. Blogs, wikis, message boards, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more engage users in different ways than the traditional media does and for this reason, it's called the new media or social media or even the we media.

A paper called "We Media" released by The Media Center reported that the attacks on September 11th "generated the most traffic to traditional news sites in the history of the Web" and helped to initiate this do-it-yourself journalism or citizen journalism. The paper came up with a definition to describe participatory journalism in an effort to refer to the online communications of social and collaborative media.

Participatory journalism: The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

One person quoted in the paper suggested that journalists are no longer the go-to person when it comes to informing the public. Rather journalists are the forum leader or mediator. They are someone who engages the public instead of simply lecturing to the masses.

Another interesting research statistic I found in the paper was that 84% of Internet users (90 million Americans) "have participated in online groups" and 26% of users have even used the Internet as a catalyst to further develop their ties to the community. With this information in mind, new media becomes a powerful tool that journalists, marketers, and PR professionals can use to reach their target audience and even influence a segment of the population.

Bruno Giussani in the journal article entitled "A New Media Tells Different Stories" says that the Internet has made it so the journalist is no longer above the reader. Both sets of individuals are now on the same plane in terms of communication.

This is forgetting that the electronic environment flattens out all forms of hierarchy and allows the same power of communication to each and everyone. The journalist's role as an expert, as the one most entitled to formulate information is declining. One of the most remarkable aspects of the interactive digital environment is the progressive vanishing of the lines dividing the producer and the consumer of information. On the Internet, everyone is at once a potential writer and journalist, editor and reader, seller, and buyer. The users are your best teachers, listen to them, someone said, and how right he was.

Instead of the newspaper simply being a product that people purchase and then read, the newspaper can now become a place. A place where people can go online to read, learn, and engage in a community where people share their opinions and reactions to the articles and the issues discussed from within these articles.