Evolution of Journalism & Storytelling
What is journalism? A quick google will fetch you something like this, "the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast." In this definition news appears twice, now think what is news? Is it just an acronym formed by taking the four directions which are north, east, west, and south, or something more. One can relate the term news with anything new happening around him or her. It means newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events, literally. So now we know what journalism and news mean. Now, the problem is how do we report this or structure the information in a consumable manner. It's fair to say the technology played a significant role in how the information or news was structured, with innovation in media technology there was a change in structure and how news is presented.
Ever heard of the inverted pyramid, 5 Ws and H? These are the first things that journalists are taught, which they swear by when reporting news and events. The interesting part is how it came to existence and it's tightly knitted with a media technology of yesteryears, the telegraph. The telegraph was a revolutionary device when it came out but it had its limitations as well, one being the information was transferred through wires. This often resulted in lost connections so it made sense to send the most important information first so that even in case of a lost connection the crucial part goes through.
Then came, newspapers tabloids and magazines which gave the journalists more freedom to try various forms of narratives to tell a 'story'. Long-form journalism became quite popular which doesn't have to follow the inverted pyramid structure as journalists started utilizing various other tools to propagate information. The use of characters became quite popular to tell stories, just like characters are used in prose and novels to keep the readers interested. The main difference being the characters in journalistic articles are real characters, who are sources of information but are presented in a humane way to magnify the impact of the news.
Fast forward to modern time, these methods of narration are still prevalent but the media has witnessed another round of groundbreaking innovations, the internet, and social media. These two have single-handedly changed how we consume news and information and, even how we interact with them. The number of clicks any article of journalistic piece receives became the new metric to measure success. The essence of telling a story for journalists is almost gone or is under serious threat. The internet has given the power of breaking a story to each and every person who can access the internet. A video, an audio clip, or even an image can be shared with the entire world instantaneously.
10 News that broke on Twitter first.
All these aspects are taking the storytelling part away from journalists as they struggle to keep up with the changing landscape. Storytelling meant the writer is in power as he/she decides how will the story be told, what to add, and what to omit. Even nowadays it is still synonymous with news and is used in the newsroom all the time.
However, calling journalism as storytelling and journalists as storytellers in modern context will limit the role of journalists. We live in a time where events are streamed, everyone is present on social media and share information all the time or at least claim to do so. The information out there has no structure and only relying on storytelling can result in overlooking certain information, which does not tend to follow the designated story structure.
Journalists need to be more open to ideas and keep in mind that technology defines the medium, which in turn decides the structure of information or story. Journalists are using social media platforms to break stories and engage the audience. Innovative ways are being adopted by news organizations to inform the audience by using tools provided by social media platforms.
The power of social media has given birth to a new devil as well, fake news. It's not that, fake news is something exclusive to only the age internet. It has been there since ages but social media and the internet magnified it significantly. Raising doubts over content that we consume online, whether it can be trusted or not. This added an essential role to a journalist's profile, fact-checker, which was there always but now they have to fact-check information posted bu others as well, which is a lot.
So in a way internet changed the way journalists break news but has added other significant work on their working lists as well. They have to act as floodgates to control this heavy downpour of information which masks itself as news. In a way, their work has become much more diverse and crucial and surely not just limited to storytellers.