Digital technology is reinventing journalism

CYBER DISPATCH

By Ike Suarez - Manila Times

As the world monitors events in Burma, yet another significant development is taking place there with regard to news and information gathering as well as its distribution.

Military repression in that country has forced the rest of the world to rely mainly on a militia of citizen journalists for breaking news on the massive protests against the junta that has oppressed the Burmese people since 1988.

The global media—whose elite and regular forces in television, radio and print normally cover such events worldwide almost as a matter of routine—has been sidelined from most of the coverage there. Its role today has mostly been that of support for the guerrilla communicators by way of aggregating and editing their contents.

Making this possible is an array of digital-enabled and interactive media many professional journalists in the Philippines still dismiss as mere toys for today’s teenagers and post-adolescents.

Chief among these are blogs. Also included in this array are online photo sharing files such as Flick’r, cellular phones with cameras, digital video cameras and online video sharing portals such as YouTube.

Playing a role here likewise are websites and news groups. They are now potent weapons in the Burmese people’s struggle for liberty.

Undergirding all these is the Internet.

Clearly, the valor of the Burmese people has captured the world’s imagination. Clearly also, a sea change in global media has taken place.

The Burmese people have shown that citizen journalists can rise to the occasion when needed. They therefore deserve respect from professional journalists.

The emergence of citizen journalists as legitimate purveyors of news and information also means journalists in print and broadcast must now rethink their roles and reinvent their profession.

Therein lies the rub.

The roadmap for reinvention and re–examination has still to be laid out. Indeed, the final destination of this journey has still to be defined.

One can merely examine clues for now and mull over possibilities. At least a generation is needed for journalists to reinvent their profession.

Some indicators from the Burmese people’s heroic struggle are the following:

1) Digital-enabled and interactive media may be demassified; but when the circumstances are there, they possess a massiveness of reach traditional print and broadcast can never equal;

2) Anyone with an Internet-enabled device is both a recipient and disseminator of news and information;

3) Traditional and Internet-enabled media are never mutually exclusive, but are instead, mutually supporting;

4) Methods tyrants traditionally employ to suppress news and information are no longer potent;

5) Professional journalists still have a value proposition in this new media environment, at least for now.

The value proposition lies in professional journalists integrating into their work and aggregating the content produced by citizen journalists.

It also calls for professionals in the newsrooms of newspapers, magazines, radio and television to embrace citizen journalists as truly their brethren. Not doing so would be an act of psychological denial.

No matter the massacres and mass arrests, the handwriting is now on the wall for Burma’s military junta. So, it is also for practitioners of the craft of journalism, whose profession evolved with the historical development of the Industrial Age.

Print and broadcast journalists must therefore start reinventing themselves now. If not, they will end up where the tyrants in Burma’s military junta are destined to find themselves—history’s dustbin