Everything changes

As the time goes by, you and everything about the world you live in changes. You are not the same person as you were a couple of years ago. You grow, mature. Your outlook about life is different as you learn new things through the education, environment and significant others. The inventions around are changing, too. I believe that main aspect that helps everything change is growth of technology.

In terms of Journalism, it has been going through several major technological changes during the past few decades. The print revolution started with the invention of printing by Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century. In his workshop, he brought together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink and the wine-press to print books. The printing press is not a single invention. It is the aggregation in one place, of technologies known for centuries before Gutenberg. Journalism then differed to what it is like now.

Before the birth of the Internet, newsrooms largely consisted of reporters and editors who relied on the conversations they had with people and the pen and notebook in their hands. There was no such thing as cameras and recorders in the newsroom. The heart of the story came from within the writer based on the questions they asked and their style of prose. Computers were big and simple and so were the programs on them. Graphic design was only just starting to get off the ground and online publications were unheard of. Today, we can get all different types of Dictaphones and tiny cameras, which will fit in a pocket, just to make the interview and then article writing easier and quicker. Back in a day, there wasn’t such thing like Microsoft Word to check spelling mistakes and grammar, so Copy Editors had to spend ages checking the articles and making sure there were no mistakes in them. Today it can be done within a very short period of time.

The expectations are changing for readers and viewers. Print publications are expanding their viewer ship to the web. Along with the story that one could read in the paper, a short video is included with the story online. Young reporters are learning how to use handheld cameras to produce these videos and video editing software is being installed on the once archaic newsroom computers.

Technology makes it so much easier for journalists to go off and write a good story to sell. Travelling and communication aren’t an issue these days either like it used to be. Instead of walking or using a horse as a quick way of communication between villages, people can get all different sorts of travel sources, such as cars, buses, taxies, even hot air balloons.


I wonder what technology will do with the world in a dozen years.