Strategically Communicating

After reading various thoughts on new media and journalism, questions loomed in my mind like, “What did people think of the telephone when we first started using it?” What about radio and TV? These things are tools. They change our lives to the extent we allow. We can use them to learn and enlighten or use them to check out of reality or spread rumors. I am skeptical of any predictions about what new technologies mean to media in the future. What technology has done what it’s creator envisioned or what it’s critics feared?

This was an interesting and related find along that line of questioning: http://polymathprogrammer.com/

What recent writing on new media and journalism makes clear, is that journalism is changing. New media and people’s use of it is changing also. But I don’t think we will know what this means to us, in a broad sense, for some time. What it means now is the emergence of an unstable, high-speed, high-stakes and highly competitive field that intersects visual arts, writing, journalism, rhetoric and technology in ways we are all learning and adapting to at varying degrees.

What I read: a sampling of recent articles on new media and journalism…

http://www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/what_i_saw_at_the_hyperlocal_revolution.php?page=%7B%221%22,%20%22all%22%7D

http://blogs.dw-akademie.de/asia/?p=2531

http://mashable.com/2011/10/13/media-literacy-journalism/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/five-myths-about-social-media/2011/09/15/gIQAr2BwAL_story.html

Questions:

1. How will new media and changing journalism impact your work as a communicator in the next three years?

2. What is the biggest challenge you face with these changes? What is your reward?