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Future Technological Impacts and Influences on News Reporting and Presentation

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Future Technological Impacts and Influences on News Reporting and Presentation

Forms of technology have always had a significant influence on the way news is both reported and presented; there is no reason to suppose this situation will change as new technologies develop and mature in the future.

Examples from the past are legion, but a couple of particularly striking ones may serve to illustrate the extreme impact changes in technology have upon what we regard as "news".

The development of the printing press (in Europe in the mid-Fifteenth Century) allowed for the first time the widespread and low cost dissemination of written material. Reading was no longer the sole preserve of educated elite; the ramifications of that …show more content…

Perhaps the images are a closer reflection of ourselves than are words on a page.

One further example of the past impact of technological change on news reporting and presentation, likewise, is still very much present (or perhaps, dominant) today: live television broadcast from the scene of news events. Developed from the 1960's onwards, due to a number of converging technologies, for example, smaller cameras, satellite communications, portable power, it is now a given that any significant news event will have instantaneous live television coverage. Indeed, entire networks (CNN, Sky News, BBC World) now exist based upon this foundation of live news.

But is this unending live news good news? Former political correspondent of The New York Times, and editor for New York magazine and Esquire, Richard Reeves, believes "...today's high-tech fusion of cable television, electronic information services and pop culture, has removed the filtering process of reporting, editing and writing that separates journalism from the raw act of communication." (as cited in Martin, 1997). And Bob Jobbins, chairman of the UK's Rory Peck Trust (a journalist's charity) says: "The power of technology can lead to the homogenisation of content and originality is the hardest thing to protect..." (as cited on BBC News Web page, 2002).

Given these quite fundamental examples of how new developments in technology have

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