So - What is Media Convergence?

What is Media Convergence?


From the Encyclopedia Britannica, Media Convergence is explained as the interconnectivity between “computing, communications, and content”. Carmen Luke separates media convergence into three levels:
1) Convergence of functions
This is your iPhone, Blackberry, or laptop. One single device now functions as multiple devices. Your iPhone can be a messaging device, mp3 player, gaming device, camera, Internet portal, and telephone.
2) Provider convergence
This is when a single company offers an array of services: a company that owns broadcasting, online, radio, and print sectors.
3) Tighter connection between “information, consumerism, popular culture, entertainment, communication, and education”

Luke, Carmen. "As Seen on TV or Was that My Phone? New Media Literacy." Policy Futures in Education 5 (2007): 50-57.

Well, why should we care?

We believe that every piece of information is formed as a message. Due to today’s increasing interconnectivity, devices have multiple functions, and there are multiple ways to get messages on the very same topic. Depending on the medium, messages can fluctuate in effectiveness, distortion, and bias.

These different ways of getting information changes the meanings, and we are no longer getting the original message. How can we become immune by this? Can we, as consumers of information, become smarter consumers? Maybe we should think more about what messages we are getting from which specific provider or channel?

This blog will explore what exactly happens to this “original message,” and in turn, how this will affect YOU as a modern person living in the year 2009, as well as how it will affect our FUTURE GENERATIONS.

We also were very lucky as we conducted a phone interview with Professor Eric Patrick from Northwestern University's very own Radio/TV/Film department. Be sure to hear him out - he talks about Marshall McLuhan and Henry Jenkins, theorists we have studied in class!

Check out Part 1
Check out Part 2
Check out Part 3

Check out Part 4

Do Students Care About Media Convergence?

Apparently, they do!

We surveyed 100 college students at Northwestern University to investigate the relevance and importance of media convergence. Out of the students who participated, 91% of college students agreed that messages get altered depending on the medium through which they are presented.

Furthermore, after reading a brief description of media convergence, 91% of these college students believe it is important to assess the potential implications of this phenomenon and how different mediums affect the interpretation of the original message.

With the rise of online news publications, more students are utilizing multiple distribution channels to attain information. In our survey, 61% of respondents reported using multiple distribution channels to gain information on a specific news story. These survey results stress our peers’ willingness to learn about media convergence, and we hope to provide them with that opportunity.

Click picture to see survey results!

I guess these students are not as apathetic as I originally once thought! Go Cats!

Media Bias: A Case Study of Juxtaposition

Fox: “We report. You decide.”
“Fair and Balanced”
CNN: “America’s Most Trusted News Source”

You decide. Which “news” sources is the neutral one that presents information just the way it is, casting nonbiased influence over the public? To think that the answer to this question is even possible is absurd. Despite cable news networks’ claims to be opinion-neutral in its news reporting, the media is the culprit that distorts and filters original news messages and content via different distribution channels (online, TV news platforms, newspapers, magazines, etc.).

As giants in the news reporting industry, Fox News and CNN are no different.

In fact, they are frequently criticized and ridiculed as two biased names in news, consistently delivering “pure synthesized propaganda” (Dubach). Fox, also known as FauxNews and FoxNoise, is a branch of News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch (Daily Kos), which demonstrates its conservative leaning across the network. In fact, Robert McChesney, author of “The Problem of the Media”, criticizes that “Fox has substituted real journalists with ‘celebrity pontificators’ because it’s just plain cheaper” (Dubach). On the other hand, rival CNN’s liberal bias is embedded in the tone of its reporting’s. To analyze how each network is infusing its left or right-wing opinions and propaganda into its reporting, I present the following case study on the reporting of opinions on the Iraq War as juxtapositions so that you, the readers, can see for yourself:

Differences in views of the Iraq War

Fox:

Click here to visit article

CNN:

Click here to visit article

In March 2007, both CNN.com and FoxNews.com conducted public opinion polls on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the War in Iraq. While CNN, reporting on the findings of its own polls, reported on its negative perspective of the invasion of Iraq, Fox’s stories, reporting on a poll conducted by the London Times, avoided criticisms. CNN titled the article, “Poll: Confidence in Iraq war down sharply”, a stark contradiction to Fox’s “Poll: Only 27 Percent of Iraqis Say Country Is in Civil War”. From the titles alone, the reader can already tell the polar opposite directions and approach that each news platform would take. CNN outright reported as a statistic that Americans are remarkably “less confident and proud of their country’s involvement in Iraq” (Holland). In contrast, Fox reports that the Iraqi public exhibited “a striking resilience and optimism…[and] do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war”. Fox’s evident conservative bias was clearly manifested as it combated the negative opinions of the American public by indirectly telling Americans what they should [not] think.
As you can see,

the same event or piece of information, through the different medium it was presented, became distorted and partial to a particular opinion.

News networks create avid followers that think a certain way (with some kind of political bias). Moreover, viewers who already possess certain biases are subject to the selective attention bias, falling under the human trap of only looking for information that suits what they already believe. In this way, they create even more bias in their knowledge of news information, creating a never-ending cycle that keeps on repeating. I challenge you, that the next time you see or hear a news reporting, to compare that with another news source and learn how to avoid being subjected to the opinions of news networks and make up your mind by yourself. It’s tougher than you think.

Susan Boyle - your local Scottish neighbor!

Susan Boyle, a Scottish local, rose to ultimate global fame literally overnight. On the night of April 11th, 2009, she stepped onto the stage of TV show “Britain’s Got Talent,” and performed the song “I Dreamed a Dream” from hit musical Les Misérables. Within a week, there were “103 million total video views on more than 20 different Web sites.”
(http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/2009/04/20/susan-boyle-breaks-past-100-million-online-views/)

Her rise to fame can be quantified by Google searches. If we look at search volume of the phrase “Susan Boyle” on Google, you see a huge spike happen in April 2009:

So how exactly did Susan Boyle suddenly become such a worldwide wonder? Let us look at this through media convergence:

We have one original message: “Unexpected talent in a common, tattered-looking 47 year old.” Most of us got this original message through YouTube videos, like the one embedded in this very blog.

Our local Scottish Neighbor Susan Boyle is filtered - many many times!

Here are some of the many ways that we could have learned about Susan Boyle through a filtered message:

1. Directly from watching TV Show “Britain’s Got Talent”

Finding out about Susan Boyle through “Britain’s Got Talent” is probably the “purest” and most “original” message you can possibly get (that is, of course, if you were lucky enough to be sitting in the direct audience that night!). When watching the actual show, the real-time TV audience is not set up for any expectations. They are simply watching the show, and are introduced to Boyle with a context of other “Britain’s Got Talent” contestants.

Through this medium, an audience can experience a true “element of surprise.”

2. YouTube

Lynn Spigel talks about “Youtubization,” and TV being able to be consumed in “snackable clips.” These clips “appear for personal amusement, but are also entering into the popular vernacular as we e-mail bits of TV to each other as part of online conversations.”

(Lynn, Spigel. "My TV Studies . . . Now Playing on a You Tube Site Near You." Television & New Media 10 (2009): 149-53.)

This is indeed true. I saw friends post Susan Boyle’s YouTube link on their gchat status, facebook status, Twitter account, email, or through instant messenging. YouTube made Susan Boyle that much more portable and transportable.

For the person who finds out about Susan Boyle through YouTube, he or she is pretty much already expecting something spectacular, as they have been directed to these YouTube videos through friends.

3. Celebrity Gossip site Perezhilton.com

http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-12-susan-boyle

On April 12, the day after her performance, Perez blogs and embeds a video of Susan Boyle, then exclaims:
You MUST watch this whole thing!!!!!!

Susan Boyle is her name. She's competing on Britain's Got Talent.

She's 47 years old, and she wants to be a singer.

She attempts to do I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables.

Oh, boy.

It is something to be seen!

-----------

Perez Hilton strips down all information and presents it in six lines. The message is highly condensed. The use of his words she “wants” to be a singer, and she “attempts” to sing the song almost contains a certain element of sarcasm. This can be seen as potentially snarky, which then alters the very original message and already creates a sort of biased perspective for audiences.

4. CNN Online

(http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/TV/04/16/susan.boyle.simon.cowell/index.html?iref=newssearch)

Some may have found out about Susan Boyle through CNN’s web site. On April 16, CNN did an interview with Susan. By that day, CNN quotes that “a clip of Boyle's performance had more than 11 million views on YouTube by Thursday.” By presenting facts and Susan Boyle’s personal quotes, CNN comes across as authoritative in tone and rich in information.

As we can see, depending on where we get this message, the original message has been altered. Media convergence is everywhere – even with something as familiar to us as Susan Boyle, this woman with the beautiful voice.

Swine Flu Incites Panic--Thanks to Media Convergence

Today, we can choose to stay up to date with relevant information and receive realtime news coverage at any given time of the day. With the advent of the Internet, and more recently smart phones, such as the Blackberry and the iPhone, we receive alerts to current events with a speed that was unimaginable 20 years ago.

For example, on Sunday, April 20^th health officials in the US declared a public health emergency. There were 20 confirmed cases of swine flu in the US, and the extent of the severity of the new H1N1 strain was uncertain. Nonetheless, the topic peaked the interest of the media and within a few days, the swine flu scare hit the public by storm. I was amazed at how fast the news spread, but more importantly, I was astonished at how quickly the public responded.

I first learned about it that Sunday while I was browsing on Facebook. One of my friends who attends UC San Diego posted a link on her page, directing anyone who clicked on it to the New York Times online article titled, “U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu.” My first reaction after reading that title was undoubtedly fear. As I continued to read the article, however, I realized there wasn't enough information to prompt me to panic and book my flight home for fear of catching the swine flu from one of my roommates. Instead, I went back to my apartment to tell my friends about the news, but they, too, had read the article posted on Facebook.

The next day, swine flu became the hottest topic of conversation on campus. People showed their friends the article on their iPhones, Blackberries, or laptops in class or in the dining halls.

"I'm cute but so so dangerous!"

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/01/25/ladies-and-gent/

On Monday, April 27^th, a middle school in California shut down because a teenager had potentially contracted the virus, but it was not confirmed. Several schools shut down soon after. Although these schools were taking precautionary steps, the CDC did not encourage these actions because the severity of this new strain was not confirmed. Clearly, the media was able, through the use of different distribution channels, to incite fear in the public effectively.

On May 5^th, CNN.com posted an article stating “Swine flu [is] no worse than regular flu.” In retrospect, I wonder if these schools took too drastic of a measure to shut down when insufficient information was available. Although it is wonderfully convenient to receive news updates as soon as they occur via multiple platforms, perhaps having this option can distort the message to the point where the true message is blurred. If the news about the swine flu had progressed in a manner that was consistent with the findings of the severity, perhaps we would not have jumped to conclusions so quickly. I am not arguing that having multiple media forms is detrimental to society, rather I think it is imperative we reevaluate how these forms of communication will change or distort future messages of importance to the public.

For example, Alan Reiter, President of Wireless and Mobile Computing, a consulting firm, wrote an article in response to the swine flu hysteria titled “How the Internet Can Calm Swine Flu Hysteria.” In this article, he suggests we need to “use internet tools – graphics, mainstream news articles, blogs, twitter, and social networking sites-- to inject rationality into discussion.”¹ Thus, instead of jumping to conclusions about the dangers of the swine flu, we should be using these tools to become better informed citizens. In order to put the implications of the swine flu in perspective, he suggests utilizing maps and and charts in news articles to contrast other phenomenons that are often overlooked but cause many deaths and illnesses, such as pollution. Instead of using the Internet to create unnecessary scares, we should be using it to “undo the incorrect and misleading information.”²

1http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id=176156
2http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id=176156

Check Out What Ron Paul Thinks About Swine Flu

The iPhone

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It's very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. ... Apple's been very fortunate in that it's introduced a few of these.”
- Apple’s Steve Jobs, revealing the iPhone

“Anyone privy to the release of the iPhone is going to hold on to their current device as long as they possibly can, all but Scotch taping their devices together so that they can crawl over the finish line and into the loving arms of a shiny new iPhone. (Oh, you know the box is gonna be sexy)”
- Singer/Songwriter John Mayer

From the moment that it was first announced to the public, Apple’s iPhone was a smash hit. When the product launched in June 2007, Apple sold an astonishing 270,000 units in the first 30 hours. Many people associate these high sales figures with Apple’s popularity at the time; the iPod and iTunes were already in vogue, and the iPhone’s sleek design and touch-screen interface clearly made it the next must-have technological advancement from Apple.

But while the general public was thrilled to have a more sophisticated phone that doubled as a stylish status symbol, media experts were more interested in the iPhone’s impact on media convergence. “The iPhone's key advantage over competitors may not be the interface or touch screen,” industry observer and journalist Glenn Fleischmann noted in an interview with Tech News World. “It may be the fact that it's perfectly simple to play music and video on an iPhone and also make calls and browse the Internet. There aren't any compromises, except on the keyboard.”

With the advent of the iPhone, as well as other mobile media devices such as the Blackberry, media consumers are able to get more and more information in the palm of their hand. But what are the consequences of having all of this information at our fingertips (literally)? Just like Steve Jobs pointed out about the iPhone, these new breeds of mobile technologies “change everything.” People can access all sorts of messages from the web browsers of their Blackberries and iPods, including instant messages from friends, sports scores, celebrity gossip, and even hard news from reputable sources like CNN or the New York Times. The popular Internet blog Read Write Web, which focuses on Internet and technology-related issues, uses Twitter to promote its posts (CNN and other sources do the same thing). Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick writes, “Twitter is a remarkably good traffic driver to our posts. A healthy little group of people click through our links on Twitter, some more via FriendFeed and they often give us great early feedback.” This raises a question, though: what about those Twitter users, especially those on mobile phones, who don’t take the time to click on the links? Will their knowledge of news and current events be reduced only to headlines and story teasers?

Lastly, the iPhone and Blackberries may not be the harbingers of media convergence that everyone has praised them as. One skeptical consumer, pcmag.com reporter John Dvorak, feels that this current trend toward do-everything mobile devices is just a repeat of the black box fallacy. In his piece “Rethinking the iPhone,” he writes, “the iPhone is really a dream of consolidation. In other words, it's wishful thinking. It won't be more than a passing fad as a fashion accessory, and it will never cut it as an iPod replacement or a phone… Any sort of device consolidation, like what the iPhone possibly promises, is a pipe dream and runs counter to real and immutable trends.”

Looks Can Be Deceiving...

Have you ever read an article without looking at the accompanying pictures? Read an article in the newspaper and do not look at the photographs. Then, ask a friend to read the same article and focus on the visuals.

I challenge you to do this because photos can greatly impact how you receive a message.

If you visit any online newspaper site, you will notice you can access a gallery of photographs related to the story. This would be impossible in hard copy newspapers because there is limited space. You can quickly send a message without text to a friend by sending him or her a picture taken by your phone’s built- in camera; more often than not, the picture will speak for itself.

Electronic media have undoubtedly shortened the time required for a message to be delivered. Additionally, it seems we also desire to shorten the time it takes to process the message once it's delivered by using images to depict the message. Although photographs enhance stories, we need beware of how these images affect information processing.

In 1993, Communication professors Wayne Want and Virginia Roark, conducted a study to discover readers' cognitive and “affective responses” to photos and the relating articles from different newspapers. The subjects were 204 high school students, mostly 18 year old seniors. Each student was instructed to read the front page of a newspaper and then took a quiz to test how well the student interpreted the information. Photographs that didn't complement the story hindered the reader's ability to process the information. Also, after viewing photos and related articles, the subjects tended to “underestimate future events.” Overall, the results showed when it comes to storing information, readers have a limited capacity.

Although it may save time to just read the headline of an article and then quickly surf through the photo gallery, you run the risk of interpreting an incomplete message. Wanta and Roark, state, “If people first look at the largest photo on a page, perhaps certain types of photographs help or inhibit mental processing of information.” Thus, photographs may not only provide supplemental information but could also influence how we make sense of the story.Thus, it is crucial to dedicate the time to reading an article's text in its entirety before we begin interpreting the story based on the accompanying images.



http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/bloggraphics/catpic.jpg


--
Wanta, Wayne, and Virginia Roark. Cognitive and AFfective Responses to Newspaper Photographs. Proc. of Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communcation, 76th, Kansas. 1993. 2-41.

Facebook

Do You Have a Facebook? Probably.

When teenagers (and many adults) create a Facebook account, many do not understand what they are adhering to when they check the “I Agree” box in the Terms of Service. People do not assume that they are handing over a lot of their privacy, and that once the account is created, no matter what privacy settings are implemented, anyone can find out that you have an account. In many instances, if a person’s name is typed into Google, their Facebook homepage will pop up. We do not realize how much power we give certain media.

When agreeing to Facebook’s terms of service, you are giving them the rights to your entire profile, even after it has been deleted. Facebook has the ability to save all tagged pictures of a person, and every post that that person has ever written on others’ walls will never be deleted. It used to be that people could control the information that they put out into the world about themselves. However, ever since the MySpace boom occurred, people have been more and more eager to hand out information about themselves to the entire world. The problem is however, that people do not consider the long term affects of giving so much power to these social networking sites. The pictures that are posted on these sites and the messages that are written are never deleted. Imagine in thirty years running for a political position, do you really want one of your opponents campaign signs reading “Look what Senator Smith really has to say: HEY B*tch you were sooooo wasted last night, I hope you got some, love you slut.” Do you really think that that is going to further your career? I didn’t think so either.

An Interview with Professor Patrick - Part 1

We interviewed Eric Patrick, an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University's RTVF department. On top of that, he is "an independent filmmaker, freelance animator, Guggenheim fellow, musician, and educator." He also worked as a commercial animator, most notably for the Nickelodeon tv children's program "Blue's Clues."

This past winter quarter (2009), Patrick offered "what he believes to be the first academic course on viral videos." These undergraduate RTVF majors had to produce weekly videos, keeping in mind that they would want to make at least one go viral. This class was featured in Northwestern's NewsCenter. Be sure to check it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Patrick
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/03/viralvideo.html


Questions asked in this part of the interview:

1) Do you think that messages become altered or filtered through different communication platforms? If yes, how?

2) Why do you think it's important for us to know and understand this phenomenon of media convergence?

An Interview with Professor Patrick - Part 2

Questions asked in this part of the interview:

3) How do you think this phenomenon will impact future generations? What is the future of media convergence?

An Interview with Professor Patrick - Part 3

Questions asked in this part of the interview:

4) Why do you think people watch The Daily Show or the Colbert Report? Do you think that distorts their perception of how the news really is?

An Interview with Professor Patrick - Part 4

Questions asked in this part of the interview:

5) Do you think that it's important to use various mediums to get information on the same story (ie- news articles)? If yes, how and why?

Do You Know What’s in Your Laundry Detergent?: Media Convergence Invades the World of Nonprofits

The phenomenon of media convergence is so powerful in that it is always constantly evolving and extending to new sectors.

In fact, media convergence is changing the face of nonprofits and social enterprises.

I recently attended a speaker series titled “A Changing Nonprofit Industry” and hosted by Northwestern student group campusCATALYST, which addressed just that.

Something that struck me as particularly interesting was the story told by Mr. Dillinger, one of the guest speakers at the event. He was telling the story of how he developed the idea for his social enterprise, a for profit business organization that focuses on three primary goals: social missions, financial, and environmentalism—a triple bottom line.


Most people, myself included, don’t stop to think about mundane things, like their Tide laundry detergent, and their impact on the environment. Perhaps that’s a good thing because the alternative may be scarier than we could ever imagine.


At the lecture, Mr. Dillinger shared the story of the first time he saw his wife doing laundry. She dumped into the laundry machine cup after cup of Tide laundry detergent. Because he was environmentally conscious, he frantically went to stop her right away. He asked her, “Do you know what you just did?” Unsurprisingly, she had no idea.


*Image from source http://www.scienceinthebox.com/en_UK/programs/laundrydetergent_en.html

He went on to explain to her the harmful impacts that the 6 billion dollar per year laundry detergent industry (in the U.S. alone) casts on our environment. For example,

each load of laundry requires an average of 30 gallons of water.

Every year, each laundry machine pours out 330 billion gallons of polluted, dirty, chemically filled water, and some of these chemicals take decades to break down. All this water, in turn, flows into our lakes…rivers…ocean…you get the idea. But that’s not all. Consider the energy required to manufacture the laundry detergent. What about delivery? What about the waste that the box creates after its use?


Mr. Dillinger was in disbelief about how uneducated the public is regarding these important issues and their impacts. He decided to create a social enterprise focused on creating documentaries and videos to teach the public about these facts to raise awareness about our environment. To air these videos, he pitches to major TV networks, including educational, prime time, and news networks. Following Mr. Dillinger’s lead, I believe that many different social enterprises will spring up to take part in this revolution. Clearly, media convergence is creating and serving as the catalyst for this important change in the direction of philanthropy.

The Kindle DX

The Amazon Kindle was released in the United States in November of 2007, and it continued to fly off of store shelves and sell like crazy until mid-2008. The idea behind the product is simple: it’s a small, handheld device that can download and display books. With a library of tens of thousands of books, the ability to download materials from almost anywhere in the U.S., and even a few periodicals and blogs thrown in, it’s not difficult to see why consumers gobbled up the Kindle (and its successor, the Kindle 2), even if it is, as one reviewer put it, “yet another dedicated device you'll need to lug around with you.” But what does this have to do with media convergence?

Enter the Kindle DX.

Announced on May 6th, 2009, the Kindle DX is the next big leap forward for Amazon’s e-reader. Rather than consisting of minute and mostly cosmetic updates like the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX features a larger, sharper screen that not only supports books but textbooks, newspapers, and other diverse types of print media.
While many industry experts criticize the Kindle DX for its high price and lack of substantial technological improvements, it is important to consider what this means for the world of media convergence. Will newspapers eventually become revitalized on e-readers, where they can have the large advertising spreads that used to make print journalism so profitable? What about schools – how different will classes be when students can access all of their textbooks from a single hand-held device, rather than paying a fortune at the local bookstore? The Kindle DX may not be a major hardware leap – it still has a grayscale screen and it cannot surf the web – but it has big potential implications for the realm of media convergence. When it becomes available later this year (just in time for the holidays, of course), keep an eye out for what changes it brings… or if it just flops.

The Take-over of Hulu

Never in the history of technology and media has there been a time where people have access so much information all at once. We live in an age where powerful corporations own the majority of the world, and therefore hold power over a lot of the receivers of this media. With such an influx of new media, one question comes quickly to mind. Do we comprise the messages that we receive by only using a few forms of media?

Hulu, the online television tycoon, has changed the way that people all over the world are viewing TV programs. It has become a one-click-away hot spot for people to view television programs ranging from ABC to HBO. Recently, Hulu has expanded its reign even further by its recent addition of Disney channel programs. Not only does Disney own a lot of other networks that will now be available to viewers on Hulu, but the audience for this website is becoming ageless.

I remember waking up on Saturday mornings, eating a bowl of cereal in front of the TV, watching cartoons. I have an eight year old younger brother, and our ten year age difference makes his Saturday mornings very different from my experience. When he wakes up on a Saturday, he still has his bowl of cereal, but instead of making his way to the couch, he plops himself into my mother’s office chair and goes straight to Hulu. Not only can he navigate the site himself and figure out exactly which program he wants to watch, but he can do it better than I can.

This is not a rare occurrence for young kids of his age. Children his age have grown up in an environment where media is constantly morphing into new and “easier” forms. Kids his age are used to the warp speed in which they can access media, and as a result they have no patience waiting for slower forms. I like to think of my generation (current young adults) as the “in between” generation. Granted, most of us read the news online instead of through a newspaper, and most of us micro-manage our lives with the help of an iPhone or Blackberry, but we still like to wait for certain things. For example, I still like to watch real television, sometimes even tolerating commercials. However, with the large technology corporations tailoring to an ever-evolving audience, speed is the key. Any program on Hulu can be accessible within about a minute. I however, am under the impression that good things are worth waiting for, and sometimes instant gratification is not the most rewarding route. Sure, if you are in a time crunch or a television is nowhere to be found, Hulu is a Godsend. But other than that, I like to remember my roots and plop down on the couch with a big bowl of cereal.

How Will Media Convergence Affect Future Generations?!

If you're an aspiring journalist, you might be wondering how the field of journalism is evolving and whether or not you'll be able to keep up with the new technologies. Let's face it-- hard copy newspapers are a thing of the past. As newspapers continue to embrace new media publishing methods, news articles are moving to the Internet.

So what does this mean for the future of journalism?

https://engineering.purdue.edu/EEE/InfoFor/FutureStudents/iStock_000003921402XSmall.JPG

Knowing how to operate complex multimedia technologies across different platforms may soon become a requirement for many students, and this will drastically change the field of journalism as we know it. Currently, according to Zavoina and Reichert, most staff members working for the hard copy publication don't communicate with staff members working for the online publication. This is troubling because the content in the hard copy publication may not necessarily translate to the online version. Online staff members have the freedom to make content decisions without approval. By nature, online publications are design driven, thus we may be losing the content that depicts an accurate portrayal of a news story. If these these two separate groups of people are not communicating, it is likely they will not be on the same page. Instead, they may work on a specific story, and deliver a completely different message, despite the fact they are working for the same media company.

How would this form of media convergence impact future generations at large?

http://www.masternewmedia.org/images/online_learning_trends_size485.jpg

Simply with newspapers going online, there are significant implications on how the reader perceives the message. In 1998, research showed that readers were reading online articles in conjunction with the traditional, hard copy newspaper (Associated Press). However, this was over 10 years ago, and it is probable that more people are going online to read the newspaper in place of reading the hard copy version. Zavoina and Reichert state, “Prepress (hard copy) and preposted (online) decisions about which photo to run; whether to run a photo as a lead on the Web as opposed to a lead in the hard copy edition; whether to run the photo large or small in each edition; and whether to run the photo in black and white or color in each edition all will have a definite impact on readers.” If the online and hard copy staff members continue to make independent decisions on the content appearing in the hard copy and online version of the newspaper, the perception and how messages are perceived will inevitably become skewed between older generations who prefer the hard copy version of the newspaper and the younger generations who prefer the online version. This could prove to be destructive, as it would further widen the generational gap.


---
Zavoina, Susan, and Tom Reichert. "Media Convergence/ Management Change: The Evolving Workflow for Visual Journalists." Journal of Media Economics 13 (2000): 143-51.

Sources to Thank

Ackerman, Seth. "The Most Biased Name in News." Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. 12 May 2009 .

Aronoff, Roger. "MSNBC Confirms Liberal Media Bias." Accuracy in Media 27 June 2007. 3 May 2009 .

Burger, Andrew K. "The Bumpy Road to Mobile Media Convergence." Tech News World. 18 Feb. 2007. 12 May 2009 .

Chon, Bum Soo, Junho H. Choi, George A. Barnett, James A. Danowski, and Sung-Hee Joo. "A Structural Analysis of Media Convergence: Cross-Industry Mergers and Acquisitions in the Information Industries." Journal of Media Economics 16 (2003): 141-57.

DuBach, Jared. "Fox V. CNN: An Observational Comparison." 24 Sept. 2005. Associated Content. 6 May 2009 .

"Fox News Channel - dKosopedia." Main Page - dKosopedia. 19 Oct. 2008. 08 May 2009 .

Garrison, Bruce, and Michele Dugagne. A Case Study of Media Convergence at Media General's Tampa News Center. Proc. of Expanding Convergence: Media Use in a Changing Information Environment, University of South Carolina, Columbia. 2009. 2-42.

Holland, Keating. "Poll: Confidence in Iraq war Down Sharply." CNN.com 18 Mar. 2007. 4 May 2009 .

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. "Media Convergence? I Diverge." Technology Review June 2001: 93-93.

Jenkins, Henry. "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence." International Jounal of Cultural Studies (2004): 33-43.

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