Nowadays, news and other form of media is increasingly being fed by amateurs and taking over the mobile phone. At the heart of the debate was the question of the extent to which the new media also produce “new journalism”. A professor of communication science in Münster, presented the theses that journalism is losing its classic “gatekeeper monopoly”, that the access routes to the public have multiplied and that media communication is becoming more flexible and mobile. At the same time, according to the journalist, there is a trend initiated by Google News that “technology replaces human activity.” The selection and weighting of the messages are not yet fully developed in the algorithmically determined compilation. Nevertheless, the question must be raised as to whether the offer does not increase market transparency and whether brand loyalty is lost.
The practitioners saw so-called citizen journalism, in which amateurs take the news production into their own hands, with mixed feelings. For example, Nick Wrenn, editor-in-chief of CNN International, called bloggers “allies.” This makes it more important, however, to interpret and mark the role of professional journalists in classifying the material supplied by the “laymen”. Michael Maier also found it absurd to discuss whether mass media should include the images taken by amateurs such as the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Hurricane Katrina in the US southern states or the terrorist attacks in London in their program. According to him, weblogs are simply “informants”, even if they have become more “multimedia” nowadays.
The director of Deutsche Welle, Erik Bettermann, also doesn’t care if he can receive deliveries by phone or weblog. Using the example of the tsunami at the end of 2004, he said: “Through our bloggers in southern India and Thailand, we have only really been informed about the extent of the disaster, far ahead of other radio and television programs.” He praised the work of the full-time suppliers, as his house now has “better and more sources of research.” The bloggers would be paid as freelancers according to the usual fee guidelines. But the representatives of the big medias also agreed that the “blogger hype” described by Neuberger is changing the role of the classic journalist. Maier emphasized that the pressure is getting higher, not only to piece together PR deliveries, agency news and blog feeds and to provide a “lukewarm slap” in information available everywhere, but real research. Mathias Müller, Spiegel Online CEO of Blumencron said, “Simply write down what happens, bloggers may be able to do better,”. “But categorizing and commenting is the task for the professionals.”
Closer cooperation between the mass media and the blogger community is not to be expected, according to Maier. Many of the bloggers would “not be interested” in the traditional media. There is an “over-the-top arrogance of the media,” explained the editor-in-chief of Netzeitung, because for many people there is not even a way to get a correction there. The media criticism of the bloggers must be taken seriously. According to Neuberger, however, there is already a “blogger elite that runs professional individual journalism” and competes with the mass media.
Neuberger’s view that the Internet only really finds itself in professional independent journalism with the willingness of users to pay did not want to follow. “I’m going to do a devil to praise the site,” von Blumencron replied. Advertising revenue is currently “exploding.” Maier also considers “the payment issue” to be “through”. Rather, he could imagine that getting the introduced “Breaking News” via SMS once “costs something”. They had produced “a new journalistic art form” for which his editors had to “develop a feeling” in terms of timing and news value. Spiegel Online, on the other hand, according to Blumencron, is “working on its own mobile portal, which the user can access for free”.
News and Multimedia cannot cooperate closer as what Maier said. And it has come a long way since the invention and rapid development of technology. But we cannot deny that both requires a lot of talent and consistence in the art of story telling.