EJ Gamboa
The digital revolution is here. And it has brought about remarkable changes, threatening to separate us permanently from the familiar world of brick and mortar stores, paper books, and mass media. Many businesses have suffered. Many newspapers have folded. The revolution, dynamic as it is, has not been kind to everyone. And it is far from over.
In this bold, new world, our trust in mass media is steadily dropping, and the speed of social network growth can be matched only by the pace at which our technologies advance. These changes have come together to transform media as we know it, and rewrite the rules that media professionals have lived by for decades.
This isn’t just about the age-old debate concerning the death of print, which finally appears near a resolution. It’s about more than the package through which content is published and distributed. It’s about timeliness, convenience, networks, social currency, “viralogy”, the technologies that make it all possible, and the way journalists can no longer hope to break news before someone on the web does.
Indeed, the digital revolution is an immediate and imposing threat – not to the existence of media, but to its archaic system of best practices. Journalists and other media professionals must adapt to burgeoning technologies, and the radically changing social and marketing conventions spurred by the proliferation of social networks and digital publishing software.
These professionals do not have to be made redundant by a cult of amateurs armed with social media, large networks, the new wave of mobile phones, and an ever-growing technical understanding of the digital landscape. But they must embrace the very culture that threatens them in order to survive.
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