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?

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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?

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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.


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