The journalist of the past pounded on their typewriter, interviewed with a tape recorder, and marketed themselves by recommending their publication to anybody who would listen. Today’s journalist can type, interview and market themselves from the capacity of their mobile phone if they want to. This change represents not only a change in the industry, but also in the way citizens consume news every day and who they consume it from.
In many ways, the journalist can control their own destiny in today’s world. While the content they create may be for a specific company, the journalist can now be the face of their own work, especially when they post it on social media accounts that contain not only their name but also their face. This is huge, as if even though the work may not technically belong to them anymore, it is still represented by them and belongs to them in spirit
While the journalist gets some power back, the public takes even more of it back. Through social media applications like Twitter, any person can be a journalist. This is a concept called citizen journalism, and it is very common on social networks. The public is no longer dependent on the story to be brought to them by a journalist, now it could be just your average user who witnessed an event on their morning stroll. The public can get this information faster now, which has revolutionized how people consume their news.
With untrained journalists comes poor journalism, and unfortunately this happens quite a lot with citizen journalism. While trained journalists must be fact checked and edited, citizen journalists have little to nothing riding on their work. The spread of misinformation within journalism has severely hindered the industry reliability, and yet much of the fake news is being conducted by people not in the industry.
The Mobile aspect of journalism doesn’t start and stop with twitter, and social media apps in general. Reporters can use their mobile devices for pretty much anything involved with the industry. This ranges from small tools like video recording and sending emails all the way to writing and filming stories from said mobile device. Even though cameras and computers are preferred, they are not the only avenue anymore. A journalist could theoretically do their job to the fullest extent from their mobile device, and while it may not be comfortable it is a way where journalists can do their jobs in more ways then ever imaginable in the older days.