You’re immersed in the evening news of 2010. A ninety-second video bulletin reports an important extraterrestrial discovery on Europa, Jupiter’s largest moon. Using your head-worn display, you look around the surface simply by turning your head. You look at the left-hand portion of the three-dimensional omnivideo (your gaze acts as a mouse would today) and say “select,” and a second window in your immersive environment plasma display reveals a special video inset with detailed animation showing how life began under Europa’s frozen hydrogen crust. A special commentary from Arthur C. Clarke, the inventor of the communications satellite and the man...

Imagine a library that carries the equivalent of 4,925 daily newspapers from all over the globe. Stop imagining: it’s here. The Internet provides more news content than that every day, most of it free. So it’s not surprising that increasing numbers of the world’s estimated 359 million–plus Internet users are going online for their news.¹ Of course, the Internet provides a lot of information of dubious value and origin. Anyone with a computer, a modem, and an axe to grind (or an agenda to promote or a product to sell) can create a credible-looking Web site and publish “news”...

Technology has always played an important part in the news-gathering and production process. Whether scribbling notes on a page, recording an event on videotape, or taping a telephone interview, journalists are accustomed to using a variety of technical tools to acquire the raw data they use to tell their stories.

Advances in new media technology are transforming these technical tools, which offer new ways to process raw news data in all its forms, whether handwritten notes, audio interviews, or video content. This chapter examines three broad areas of new media tools for digital news gathering and production. First, it examines...

The Internet is a global network of computer networks using a common set of technical protocols known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocols). Born of various industry initiatives but primarily a U.S. Defense Department project to maintain communications in the advent of a nuclear holocaust, the Internet is largely a product of the inventive minds of Vinton Cerf, now a vice president for MCI, and Robert E. Kahn, president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Not controlled by any one person or organization, the Internet is a medium of multimedia content, interactive communications, electronic mail, and much more. Content...

A graphic artist darkens a photograph of a celebrity accused of a heinous crime so that his face appears more brooding on the cover of a national news magazine.¹ An editor places a banner ad at the top of her newspaper’s Web site, although she would never place an ad on the front page of her newspaper. A producer runs a story featuring a high-resolution satellite image of a well-known princess on holiday at a private beach on the Caribbean. These are just samples of the many knotty ethical issues new media raise for journalism in the digital age.²

In...

Part III examines the organizational or structural implications of new media. The traditional newsroom is organized along the lines almost of a military unit, with a strong publisher, editor, or news director overseeing a relatively rigid hierarchical organization. Decisions follow a strong chain of command. Online newsrooms tend to be increasingly decentralized and flexible, especially those that are original to the Internet, and they reflect a more experimental and adaptable entrepreneurial culture. Staffs are much more likely to include legions of freelance contributors. Although this gives the online newsroom an adaptable design, it also makes it more difficult to instill...

Many of the newspapers worldwide that have launched news Web sites have created separate newsrooms for their online products.¹ The advantages of maintaining a separate new media staff include creating a mechanism to generate original news reporting for online publication. In some cases, newspapers that have not set up a separate new media staff have put incredible demands on their reporters, who must now report for both the newspaper and online. People are putting in sixteen- to twenty-hour days and getting burned out.

In the case of the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, one of the most successful online news...

The Chinese character for crisis is a combination of two characters, one meaning “danger,” the other meaning “opportunity.” Television news is clearly entering a period of such crisis as it confronts the prospect of full-scale digitization: the transformation of analog audio and video into digital form.¹

Traditional audio and video technologies captured light and sound wave patterns directly on film, magnetic tape, or plastic disk (i.e., the phonographic recording). Digital technologies, such as magnetic or optical disk, sample from those continuous wave patterns and represent each observation in a numeric, computer form of binary digits, 1’s and 0’s representing “on”...

The most important relationship any news organization has is with its audience. It is the economic foundation of the commercial press. Because of the advertising and subscription-based business model of most commercial media, audience size determines the profitability of the news. Yet even more importantly it is the public the press serves in a democracy Through its role in helping build an informed citizenry, the press functions as the so-called fourth estate, or fourth branch of government. It is thereby uniquely provided constitutional protection in the First Amendment.

But despite its importance, the relationship between the audience and the news...

Since the early days of online publishing, making a profit from content sites has proven elusive (with the exception of adult-oriented sites). Even without the costs of distribution, e-zines, online newspapers, and online broadcasters have struggled to find the road to profitability. Gradually, that’s beginning to change.¹ Claiming profitability or at least being at the break-even point by 1998 were a diverse range of sites including not just niche sites but mainstream news providers, such as the timesunion.com (an online spin-off from the Albany, N.Y., Times Union newspaper), Channel 4000 (the first television station site to register a profit),...

Journalists in the United States have historically enjoyed an elevated professional status: theirs is perhaps the only job offered explicit legal protection in the Constitution of the United States. But this protection has primarily protected the speech of journalists who write for products printed on paper. Although the terms speech and press have been generally interpreted by judges and legal scholars to extend beyond the printed word, electronic media have always enjoyed a much lower level of legal protection and have been subject to direct content regulation by the congressionally mandated Federal Communications Commission (FCC).¹

As the nation’s system of...

In the age of the Internet, ubiquitous information has become both a blessing and a curse. For journalists as well as anyone who is a news consumer, this is especially true. With more than five thousand newspapers and other news sources online, it is possible to enjoy more access to information than at any other time in history. But at the same time, information overload has become an ever-present fact of life.

This chapter examines the rise and role of intelligent agents as information filters, personal editors, and news summarizers in the digital age.¹ How might agent technology transform both...

In journalism, no matter how much the world changes, some things should never change, among them, checking facts rigorously; relying on reputable, known sources; presenting facts impartially; asking tough questions; and adhering to the highest ethical standards. But some things must change, or will inevitably change, for better or worse, things like the tools of the modern journalist. In today’s e-world, the tools of modern journalism are being transformed in a fundamental way in five broad areas: (1) news gathering and reporting; (2) information storage, indexing, and retrieval, especially multimedia content; (3) processing, production, and editorial; (4) distribution or publishing;...

Although graduates of traditional journalism programs enter a diminishing job market, those who are comfortable with technology and have some experience producing new media content have a brighter future. Despite the retrenchment of some major news organizations in their new media endeavors (e.g., the online venture initiated by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and MCI ), the new media market still represents the best opportunity for growth.

This discussion takes both a short-and long-term look at:

where the jobs are in new media;

the necessary skills for landing and succeeding in a new media job;

opportunities for those trained in traditional...