Roy Greenslade Article in The Guardian

Roy Greenslade in 2016 started his article in the Guardian with this sentence: “I’m with you on the digital revolution, it’s the lack of journalism I can’t face!”. In the beginning of 2000s, the 1950s developing technologies transformed into something that triggered the technological turn of the new era: The Digital Revolution. As Alves states, “few periods in human history have been quite as revolutionary for information and knowledge as the current one”. The internet, as he remarks, “has broken through as a grand transformative force, creating new environment that marks the transition from an industrial society to a digital or knowledge-based society”.

However, it is not only the society that is transformed through the digital revolution, which was enabled by the technological developments in the last fifty years.

As Küng et al.  point out, technological advances combined with market liberalization and globalization, to raise the access levels together with the participation and partaking of the society in the profession, pushed this digital revolution.

A dramatic consequence, as Küng et al claim, of this revolution unavoidably appeared to be the “blurring of boundaries between the media, telecoms and information technology sectors” . The profession of journalism, being the workforce of the whole of media industry, could not escape the drastic changes of the transition.

Accordingly, this paper aims to discuss the impact of the digital revolution on journalism very broadly. In the first section, this paper undertakes communication of a brief history of the developing technologies that led to the digital revolution.

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In the second section, the impacts as stated and examined in the literature are summarized. In the third section, I aim to analyse a case study in order to see if what has been concluded in the academic and media literature is correct. In the conclusion, I claim that the digital revolution has its good and bad impacts on the profession of journalism at the same time.

As the Science&Technology chart in Figure 1 demonstrates, the technologies that led to the 2000s’ digital revolution started way back in late 1940s. The Digital Revolution, known as the Third Industrial Revolution changed the use of analog, mechanical, and electronic technology to digital in almost all devices in our lives starting from cars to computers, to personal assistants to journalism. In the late 1970s, software, data-collection techniques and applications were already developed. The 2000s, however, brought the core of the revolution that originate from web-based communication, mobile computing, cloud computing and most of all, the wide existence of user-generated content. The industrial mass-production of mobile computing and the internet technologies led to the mobile and notification-based media outlets to be more expansive on the smart phones, opening way to a greater access to information that the world has never encountered previously.