Year 12 media: How the Internet has revolutionised the Media by Hollie O’Byrne

The leap from web 1.0 to web 2.0 has made a huge impact on the media and is leading towards abandoning the traditional ways of media.

The internet has revolutionised the media, the newspaper industry is now in crisis. Broadsheets like The Guardian are losing £100,000 a day. Income from advertising has disappeared as more advertisers are also migrating to the web in order to reach a wider global audience. David Gauntlett is a theorist who came up with the analogy Web 1.0 being a garden and Web 2.0 being an ‘allotment’. The development from web 1.0 to 2.0 means that audiences can’t only just look at the media, they can create, share and edit on online material. Audiences can now contribute, produce and consume the media. These people are now called prosumers as they are active participants of the media.

As Web 2.0 has continued to develop and has lead to creating an online community of people who Dan Gillmor calls ‘Citizen Journalists’ he suggests that large media corporations cannot control the media anymore. News is being published as it unfolds which is available to everyone, via the internet for free. Gillmor states that ordinary citizens use blogs and we media and user generated sites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. to share our news, which he calls ‘Citizen Journalism’. Twitter has played an important role in the media during big events such as the summer riots of 2011. It was said that some riots were organised through twitter, people were using false identities but then those who commented, shared were exposing their identities which helped unroll new leads to who started the violence. News that a protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan had descended into violence was being passed along a chain of thousands of Twitter users before journalists had even arrived at the scene. The observations of local residents and observers of the riots- citizen journalists- proved useful. 

The Guardian not just a newspaper, but a multimedia platform available for audiences to see globally, this is because of web 2.0. The Guardian was the first UK national newspaper to use web first stories which means stories that are produced on the web before print, blogging software and podcasts. There is a comment is free section, readers responses and forums. 

Rupert Murdoch's news corporation has the largest overall share of newspaper circulation. Profitability of the newspaper is in question due to the popularity of the web and ‘free online news’ The Times website has recently introduced a paywall which means users can only read a certain amount of an article and if they wish to continue they need to pay in order to do so.

Miss Alleyne's comments 

Well done Hollie!

You have applied what we have learnt in class and used examples from the Guardian case study. Confident use of media terms such as web 2.0 and cross media convergence. Also excellent points made about web 2.0, citizen journalism and we media.  Keep up the hard work!