The Future of Journalism

I believe that with increased popularity of online journalism, the need for shorter and more condensed forms of articles comes with it. The Atlantic video “How is Social Media Changing Journalism?” talks about how social media has changed the journalism to reach a wider audience that is easily accessible to mostly anyone. Both this video and “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism’” in the Atlantic talk about the idea of “new journalism” and “old journalism”. Though both of these pieces have a different take on these concepts where the video believed that ultimately old and new journalism is the same and the article believed that new journalism has a lot of different expectations I believe that the concept of new journalism has a lot to do with the brevity social media has brought to journalism. “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism’” speaks a lot about how the term “long-form” can have a negative connotation in today’s society’s eyes. For an example, when I watched the video of the Atlantic I found that extremely easy to get through a 2 minute 19 second video and never lost my attention. Where reading the article took a little more effort and time where I looked at other tabs and even got up to get a glass of water and talk to my roommate across the hall for a minute before I could re-involve myself in the article. I think that the new age of social media and just technology in general has gave the phrase “long-form” a bad connotation, but not purposefully. This is the way our generation’s minds have been trained with the fast pace of twitter with only 140 characters allowed and Facebook where most articles have highlighted bullet points so that the reader does not have to read the full article to get the point across.