The nature of journalism has been greatly changed by the internet age.
In this age of “instant journalism“ nearly anyone has the opportunity to create “publish” their own content.
There are many pros and cons of this, some of which, I’ll touch on below :
Pros :
More “small local“ stories can rise to public attention and can gather more attention than they would be able to if not for wide spread access to internet publishing.
This can help accelerate social change. For example stories of gun violence and shootings of people of color are now more publicized, and are creating more public dialogs. The increased public attention will hopefully lead to positive change. More people get to enjoy publishing something experience feedback fro it.
There are many more opportunities for freelance journalism to publish, via digital mediums now than when only print form existed.
Cons:
We have access and are exposed to an even larger, ever present stream of often depressing news and rain of photos.
Less privacy and less control can devalue the art and content… unauthorized representation and plagiarism .. ones own work can not perfectly be owned anymore
Ethics concerns are not observed, due to too much access to the mass ability to repurpose another persons work. When there was only film and typesetting, this was not as prevalent.
Now everyone can have their 15 minuets of fame over and over… is both pro and con… but the quality of the work is lesser without the copyright.
Pamela in SF 