Journalism's Place in the 21st Century.

Being a student of journalism and learning about all the future opportunities and stories to cover through this course, I have decided to write (err, type) what I believe my job will entail as we move into the future.

My future job? Virtually non-existent. At least that is how it has been explained to me. The internet is playing a major role in this, especially with the dying off of old forms of print, and the rise of internet based news coverage. My future may seem bleak right now, but I believe more opportunities are in fact going to open because of the internet, even if that means less of a traditional role in journalism.

Online news has been said to be the future of journalism. This is most likely because it already is, and that companies are trying to capitalize on being able to inform people 24/7 on thousands of topics.

Google allows me to search for results on a specific news event and come up with hundreds or thousands of results. These results are not only stories, but videos, Twitter feeds, blogs, pictures, and Facebook pages. My journalism classes have taught me that I must master all of these forms in order to stay competitive in the job market, and they even encourage me to become familiar with them now. I have a Twitter now, a Facebook profile, and now a blog. These are just tiny stones in the long road of mastering these forms of digital media, but they are something that I must continue to work on. My Twitter is still somewhat of a ghost town, mostly because I sometimes forget that I actually have an account, and the majority of the other Twitter accounts that I follow are professional news agencies like the NYT, BBC, and Al-Jazeera among others.

Becoming digitally aware in the 21st century is extremely important. I use this term "digitally aware" because not only must someone learn to use it, but learn to use it to its full potential. Because information can be so easily searched, thanks to Google, journalists must learn to build a following, and make sure their information is within the first page of a Google search result. How can you do this? Link to everything. To become an online journalism star your information must be linked to many pages in order for its popularity to increase. Being linked to large news organizations is one major step, but another one is having your information linked to other forms of media. Having your Twitter page linked to your Facebook increases its search ability, and having your Facebook linked to your blog increases your blog presence on the Web.

These are just a couple of things my professors and instructors have been teaching me about becoming a journalist. At first I was ignorant at the fact that this was vital to our future, and once I became more and more aware, I began to open up and break into the world of Twitter (which will hopefully be more active soon) and continue on blogging even after this class is over.

Censorship

Censorship was a one of the topics Jackson covered in his presentation, and as a budding journalist, it is a topic that will impact my life further down the road when my careers begins.

Jackson described the use of  gag order to limit what can be published by a third party source, and jeopardize other works by the same person. After some research, the concept of a gag order was still somewhat foreign to me, so I asked one of my journalism professors regarding this legal practice towards media outlets.

My professor, who works for the CBC, told me that it happens more often than one would think, and it impacts many of the stories they want to cover, such as court cases. There was one example that she gave me that impacted the CBC quite often. It was gag-orders issued by the government over reporting over certain topics that were currently being debated by several political leaders. Details were not allowed to be made public regarding many issues (most legal problems) and it generally wasn't until after they had been solved that they were allowed to be reported on.

The idea of a gag order being issued on an online blog or news organization seems impossible to enforce. Legal action is generally not taken until someone that the issue effects has seen it and called on their lawyers to issue the order. By that time, if the topic is controversial enough, would have spread to other online sources and gone viral. Now the idea of the gag order seems like a symbolic gesture rather than a practical one; like suing individuals over illegal downloads.

What I took from Jackson's presentation was that gag orders roles are not to stop an idea from spreading, but rather a way of scaring other third party websites (blogs) from allowing information to be published in the first place. In this sense, gag orders do not silence an individual, but rather the internet as a whole.

The last statement is impossible as we all know, but it shows the intent of organizations trying to stop information from being published in the first place, and for blogs to self censor in fear of being sued over content they've allowed to be published.

Where in countries like Cuba and North Korea where the internet is censored as a whole, in the Western world, the internet is censored in segments (political and social) and the idea of private censorship make a much longer lasting effect because we are publishing information in a country that has freedom of speech, and yet we allow for things to so easily be censored.