Digital communication systems and Journalism

Granted, the influence of journalists has diminished in the past few decades. Recently, Vanity Fair magazine published its annual listing of the fifty leaders of the Information Age, and only one was a journalist working for a mainstream news organization (Fulton 20). Journalists used to hold a monopoly over what types of news reached the public; with the growth of the Internet, this is no longer the case. The problem with the Internet, however, is the question of the credibility of information. A college student can design a Web page that is every bit as impressive as a large company like Newsweek. As one journalist notes, "You must know the source of the data; how it got in the computer; and all its drawbacks" (McIntosh 23). Many of the new competitors of traditional journalism have no journalistic background at all.

Journalism helps the public make sense of its world. One of the drawbacks of the digital communication revolution is that it has made available a glut of information that is difficult for t

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y diminishes the authority of the journalism profession, it is a reflection of the fact that many newspapers feel compelled to become more like television to survive: "Emulating TV is the precise strategy that will doom newspapers" (King 399). Part of the motivation for newspapers to assume the survival mode and lower their journalistic standards is the economics of the marketplace. Newspapers once enjoyed outstanding profit margins. During the 1980s, large metropolitan dailies with profit margins of 25 or 30 percent were common. In today's economy, these margins hover somewhere around 15 percent. Although still healthy in comparison to other types of companies, the word on Wall Street is that newspapers do not perform the way they used to, and this makes investors nervous. Consequently, Wall Street analysts wield an unprecedented amount of power over management decisions at major newspapers: "In the push to improve the bottom line, some newspaper executives overreact to suggestions--or perceived suggestions--from analysts . . . " (Jones 43). As a result, newspaper companies are downsizing and investing, not in newspapers, but increasingly in television stations, to provide the earnings growth that their shareholders cra
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Some common words found in the essay are:
WEB TV, HDTV CD-quality, Wall Street, Internet Internet, Information Age, Internet Probably, African-Americans Hispanics, Emulating TV, , Raton Florida, web tv, digital communication, information age, review 1996, future journalism, columbia journalism, journalism review 1996, columbia journalism review, journalism review, spectrum television, quill 1993 september, tabloid journalism, newspaper readership, digital communication systems, digital communication revolution,
Approximate Word count = 1658
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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