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| Traditionist View |
The future of journalism is the subject of much debate among
scholars and people within the industry. The introduction of new media, user
generated content and citizen journalism is creating pro-am relationships
within the journalism industry whether they like it or not. Thorsten Quandt
(2011) discusses the concept of participatory journalism and the opinions of
those affected in his article “Understanding a new phenomenon: the significance
of participatory journalism”. While opinions vary between ‘traditionalists’ and
‘evangelists’, I agree with Quandt that, at least from a conceptual level, a
combination of user-generated content and mass media communication offers the
best of both worlds (2011).
In either case, it is hard to ignore the impact of
participatory journalism on social trends and opinion. A particularly
interesting example was raised by Marcus O’Donnell in a lecture on the future
of journalism (2013). A relatively unknown Sydney based band reached No.1 in
the iTunes charts and No.3 in the ARIA charts without any help from the
mainstream ‘traditional media’ (Vincent, P 2013). Hindered by the
un-marketability of their heavy metal genre, the band launched a clever social
media campaign with the help of other, more established bands to achieve their
goals. This is an encouraging development in music marketing for independent
artists. In the pre-new media world of music, mainstream media dictated the
direction of popular culture which made it very difficult for new artists to
break onto the scene. As an independent artist myself, this development is both
encouraging and disheartening. On the one hand, I have the ability to potentially
reach millions of people for free. On the other, I am not the only person that
has realised this and the level of competition has reached staggering levels.
As I have a particular interest in this area, I have chosen
to research the future of music journalism in greater depth for my project.
Peace out.
References
Quandt, T 2011 ‘Understanding a new
phenomenon: the significance of participatory journalism’ Chapter 9 in Hermida
et al Participatory Journalism, Wiley Blackwell pp155-176
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