Reporters, Online

Development

The migration of journalism and media content from traditional print and broadcasting media into digital distribution using the Internet has changed and hybridized the nature of the professional reporter. An online reporter may be actively employed by a news-gathering organization, wire service, or broadcast network but may also be a freelance [Page 1200]journalist with long-term ties to several organizations, a member of the alternative press, or may be a self-employed weblogger (blogger) who acts as a news aggregator for a demographic group or simply as a journal keeper. Small-scale online reporters and bloggers often share directly in the advertising revenue which their Internet website generates.

With the rise of digital means of news collection, all of the journalist roles suggested above utilize the same technologies. What differentiates them is their degree of reliance on the web for distribution of their material, adherence to style guides, possible professional affiliations, and how they are paid. Both print and broadcast news organizations were using computers by the late twentieth century. In 1968 the several large mainframes at university campuses, U.S. government agencies and defense contractors were linked into a nonhierar-chical network now known as the Internet. By the late 1980s, Internet Protocol was standardized and simplified, allowing for expanded corporate and personal use of the Internet. The resulting World Wide Web uses hypertext links to connect information between various webpages. Any end users, including journalists, reading this information take a far more active role in its synthesis and understanding because multiple individualized paths can be created within the same information. As computer processing power and network speed increased, graphic, audio, and finally video content have been added to the formerly text-only information on the World Wide Web.

Widespread use of hypertext and other web-based forms of information navigation has changed the manner in which end users read news stories and other practical information online. As broadcast news evolves, these same changes are rapidly moving into audiovisual news gathering and distribution, often as seen on supplementary websites linked to the on-air product. Continuing changes in the business of newsgathering, reporting, and distribution has not only led to specialized online reporters but also to other social technological hybrid occupations as well, such as editing.

Categories

“Mobile journalists” are those who have no physical presence at their news-gathering organization. Instead, they collect information in the field, write their stories using portable (laptop or notebook) computers, and upload or email their completed project to their news editors. Some mobile journalists create news reports for use by radio and television newscasts, doing so remotely and using broadband connections to send their often fully edited stories or features to a newsroom or studio. This allows reporters to report more fully from either distant locations or local news events.

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