Thursday, July 8, 2010

Kneeboards With Wheels

Sardinian Prehistory of cybercronisti. Journalism and new media, Sergio Maistrello

"What have you done the last time you felt an earthquake? A limited but growing share of answers to this question might be: I wrote once about Twitter. " And maybe not only wrote: those who were present may have taken a picture with an iPhone and have it immediately shared on Facebook or other social networks, and have shot a video posted on YouTube, or simply shared information that then began to circulate in a flow of information can provide a lively and meaningful - though perhaps emotional and subjective - an event like an earthquake. Often, even before the traditional media have failed to arrive on site and produce the first services, articles and insights. As for the guy who saw Janis Krums a plane floating in water, after ditching a perfectly successful while he was in the Hudson River in New York on board a ferry boat. The boy had the presence of mind to take pictures and immediately share them on Twitter. Before they spread the news of the rescue aircraft, the network was already a picture of the incident that ran in newsrooms around the world. An amateur content that became the first absolute source for newspapers and websites "professional."
some years now we have started to become familiar with concepts such as disintermediation, cross-media journalism, citizen journalists, e-books, Social networks, blogs. Are an important part of the landscape of journalism today and more will be in the future. Not only has the network changed many dynamics in depth - from publishing formats to use the news to the ends of the journalistic profession - but new technologies are opening new scenarios for the same newspaper circulation (iPhone and iPad, e-book reader and so etc.). "A shy prehistory of a new phase, yet to understand," says Sergio Maisano, journalist and expert on web, in a book just released by Apogee, "Journalism and New Media. The information at the time of the citizen journalist. " If this is only the pre-history, then understand the mechanisms underlying these changes is essential to bet on the future and to be prepared. Starting from a key assumption: "The Internet is the first major global medium-sized individual," says Maisano. "Where radio, TV and newspapers are addressed generically to the masses of people, inside the Internet each active node is a network for the exploration of knowledge. Each filter is what you see, no one chooses a schedule for us. Everyone is free to create, publish texts, images and video with ease and cost unimaginable even a decade ago. With our personal computers today buy the equivalent in equipment technology a television production station, radio station, a publishing house. " In a "mesh" information travels horizontally and much more are all potential nodes of this trip. Not by chance have started circulating neologisms as "prosumers," the union of "producer" and "consumer". It is difficult today to keep the roles separate and waterproof. "Living in the Internet necessarily mean exposure to the interaction with others, because the media do not produce social value if they are activated both the lines of communication." This interaction produces an interesting hybrid news. It is not only the possibility to comment on articles or to ask for contributions from readers to events of some kind, but also transparently discuss the editorial choices made (the New York Times make public the records of editorial meetings, for example) to make the readers feel more neighbors and knowledgeable host the blog readers, up to a point where professional journalism works closely with a broad community of partners that carry spontaneous contributions of various kinds. The network also supports multi-media convergence of several languages, such as writing, podcat, photography, video. According Maistrello "traditional publishers serving a double difficulty at this stage must absorb practices emerging convergence of media and adapt their production processes. They can not even leave the printing plant or transmission, but it makes less and less, and must at the same time invest in research and development of new online information solutions, where the return is still uncertain. " Andrea Tramonte, Unione Sarda, 07/06/2010

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