Journalism’s Transition to Digital Media

With the rise of the internet, newspapers have been struggling to come up with new business models that can support their overstaffed companies of hundreds to sometimes thousands of journalists. But just as with any failing business, they looked for something to blame, rather than focusing on the rapidly changing methods and structure of how society receives information. That blame has been put on aggregators — referring to bloggers who reproduce their information.

Joshua Benton, the Director at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, lectures on this topic; but you might not expect what you will hear. He argues that journalism is original aggregation. Meaning that since journalism began, it has been a way to gather and share information from others (besides completely unique work like investigative journalism, of course). This idea of snippets and rewriting goes back centuries, and is not a relatively new idea. In fact, many newspapers simply rewrite their competitions’ stories. But the one thing that is better about internet reproduction, is that the bloggers of today provide sources and links to the original information, making it easy to jump to the originator in seconds.

Joshua Benton concludes that if newspapers wish to succeed amidst the technology of tomorrow, they must learn to adapt and institute new business models. And this is Benton’s area of study at Harvard University.

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