A space image of an interconnected world.
Emerging technologies was a scary course title for me when I first read about it as I am not a tech-savvy person. However, when the course started revealing its secrets about the radical changes that the journalism industry has gone through due to many financial hardships and the concept of “news desert” I was a bit relieved as I knew that this course would put me on the right track and would provide me with the knowledge that I lack about the industry.
One of the many things that I was not aware of is the importance of data in affecting the journalistic decisions in terms of organizing the piece of writing, choosing the right platform, and most importantly targeting the right audience at the right time as the distance between the journalist and his audience is determined by a “click”. Besides, it is not an easy task to trigger your audience to click, and thus knowing your audience is key. Honestly, I was not a big fan of this idea; however, after I delved into the topic and the role of data in the industry, I realized its importance as long as it is not pushing journalists to write about issues that contradict their journalistic principles just for the sake of exposure and reaching out to more audience.
The other thing that I was not aware of is the vital role of social media in today’s journalism world. The vast majority of people nowadays use their smartphones as a primary news source. Thus, not using social media platforms or not being willing to learn their ins and outs will be a big challenge for journalists as it will separate them from the audience, and it will gradually lead to the “death” of their articles and news stories as they will not know their way to the audience.
The most important lesson that I learned throughout the course is that journalists need to adapt to the new changes that the journalism industry is going through in terms of the new technologies and the newly available digital platforms in order not to find themselves excluded. As Charles Darwin once put it “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”