Download the eBook (8.25 MB) - ECREA Thematic Sections

Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
"content" remains the core of journalism. But surely, content will be conditioned by the
technology at the time of its production, distribution and reception (Cabrera, 2010).
Technological diversity allows sharing digital content between different media, static or
portable. The new devices (PDAs, smart phones, tablets, e-readers ...) have developed
many applications and tools that bring new experiences to journalism. The numerous
and changing thechnological possibilities make it very difficult to understand the effect
they will have on each phase of journalist communication process. The proliferation of
media began long time ago with the first experiences of telematic, such as videotext,
the cd-newspaper, the paper by fax, or teletext. It helps to understand the trend of
technological evolution that promotes the use of specific possibilities over others that
have been forgotten. Today, technological diversity may lead again to the selection of
one or few devices specifically for the production, distribition and reception of news
content. Meanwhile, the technological galaxy is the object of our attention. We see it as
nebula, thats needs exploration and study for a better understanding of its impact and
potential.
Recent technological advances affect the work of journalists, while imposing other
ways of bringing information to the public, allowing users to integrate in to the
communication process as producers and consumers (Couldry, 2009:447; Zhang ,
2008; Yu, Wang, Liu, Niu, 2009:93-103), thus reiterating the idea of "pantallization" of
society (screening effect) exposed by Rodriguez de las Heras (1991:49). The value of
"use" by the audience becomes more important than the technology itself (Warschauer,
2003:11). The important thing is not so much the function, but why and when people
choose to embrace and integrate the technology into their life (Katz & Sugiyama,
2006:322). The society seeks "compensation" or "bonus" inmediately (Gordon, 2011),
and develops trend "now", the “now-ism”, hipertasking, so journalists should learn new
communications technologies and be fexible to adapt them.
Although the diversity of current technologies hinders the knowledge of its qualities and
the actual solutions they provide to journalists and users, this paper presents the effort
to organize this realm by describing, classifying, and graphic visualization.
Method
In order to deep the current view of technological developments it´s necessary to
identify their common features. Despite certain differences, similarities in question
facilitate the integration of technological developments into the various phases of
communication process. However, this approach has two limitations. First, we are
unable to perform a comprehensive technical categorization due to constant
innovations taking place in this field, not only in terms of tools or devices, but also
software applications that add new functionality to these tools (which also is renewed
constantly). Second, although the approach of this work involves establishing an order
in the profusion of new technologies, the fact that they are integrated at various stages
of production of journalistic content prevents unilateral systematisation. This situation
raises the inability to make a taxonomy for its exclusionary nature.
42