Journalism surviving

People Keep Needing Its Help

Printed Media Vanish, Journalism Survives

Enrique Castejón-Lara

Abstract

This article complements the ideas expressed by the author on his prior one, entitle “Journalism is going into the re-information age.”  This paper refers to the increasing closing of printed media that has make some communication experts expose their concerns about journalism’s future. It, indeed, is confronting serious difficulties to survive in the information paperless age. However, it has a very extend know-how that offers the key to understand the fast and complex changes of the contemporary world.

Digital revolution has been ruthless with printed media. One behind other is going out of printing shop because of increasing lack of audiences. Last month, on December —a traditional happy holyday season—, one of the most important Spanish daily, El Pais, gave the first step to go out of printed version. It announced that stopped down its own printing shop to print its paper edition, with a very lower circulation, in a different press rotary shared by several printed media.

No doubt, digital and social media have an increasing influence in nowadays audiences. People, according to recent years’ experience, prefer the fastest and dynamic emission of messages on line than the 24-hour and other static printed news issues. However, journalism has a historic know-how to interpret news meaning that they cannot throw away.

The news environment, anywhere in the world, is rapidly becoming more and more complex, and very hard to understand because of the intense flow of odd messages. Journalism has methods (Meyer, 2002; Castejon, 2015) that permit chose and evaluate the most relevant issues from all news sources. So that, it has the right techniques to verify them before writing solid-reliable news stories.

In a society that, with the pass of time, is more and more immersed in an almost incomprehensible storm of messages, people will need those clarifying abilities of journalism. So, the new circumstances generated by the digital revolution make us think that, indeed, media printed on paper could be definitely vanishing. Nevertheless, journalism, once again in history, will demonstrate that it has the resources to survive in that paperless news diffusion age.

References

Castejon-Lara, Enrique. Interpretative reporting. CreateSpace Independent Publishing (Amazon), 2015.

Meyer, Philip. Precision Journalism. Rowan & Littlefield publishers, 2002.