Digital Journalism Tools

While newspaper readership had been steadily declining since the early 1980s, the decline accelerated with the advent of the commercial Internet into mainstream American in 1995. Journalism organizations noted that a growing segment of their audience turned to the web for news and information. By 2005, both established news organizations and independent journalists began using new digital techniques to create multimedia and interactive storytelling in an attempt to draw and engage audiences.

The earliest form of journalism on the Internet, beginning around 1994, simply took newspaper text and posted it to an Internet page. Many web producers at news organizations derided this early form of Internet journalism as “shovelware” in reference to the act of shoveling the content from [Page 408]one medium to another. Two major parallel developments in consumer electronics and software programming spurred new forms of reporting and displaying news online. Until 1999, what could be presented online was dictated by slow connection speeds, commonly known as dial-up, at which most people accessed the web. As connection speeds increased with the advent of cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband modems, news on the Internet moved from text-based display to incorporate photographs, and eventually audio and video.

Also prompting change was the rapid decline in the price and size of digital tools, like video and still cameras, recorders, and computers. This put tools that were formerly the purview of professionals into the hands of what Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, called “the people formerly known as the audience.” By around 2000, development of web-based applications (software that runs over the Internet rather on a hard drive of a computer), made it easier for nontechnologists to publish online. These new digital tools and the ability to create publications online at little cost, led to a paradigm shift in journalism.