Brief on digital journalism

I learned a lot about digital journalism and about how social media has affected journalism and the news industry. Digital journalism, also known as online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. For the most part it has helped journalism by increasing it’s distribution worldwide, people no longer have to buy a newspaper to find out what's going on in the world now they just have to look at their phones or computers to find out. Some news organizations try to resist social media because they find a drop in their circulation which has resulted in a loss of jobs while some embrace it with many having their own websites, news organizations formed recently like for example Buzz Feed know how to use social media and they use it to their advantage to spread their stories. Social media has also become a valuable research tool, whenever a person is in the news, Facebook or other social networks are a ready source of images, no longer needing the persons loved one to offer a picture. In a way a blogger could also be considered journalist, albeit unqualified. However social media has caused a few problems one being there is too much news, and it can be difficult for people to figure out the veracity of the news they see on social media. The readers will start to wonder which news organization they should trust especially when two news company's take different sides of a story. According to my research in 2014 the Irish Social Journalism Survey published the statistic that 64% of Irish journalists reported that information on social media could not be trusted. News publishers have lost control over distribution. Social media and other platforms have taken over the role of the publishers and now the news is now being filtered through algorithms.

As part of the research for our project I  learned how many crashes have happened on the M50, I learned that the M50 motorway in Dublin has been the scene of more than 50 collisions a month over the past year and a half, with 962 crashes occuring between 2019 and 2018 according to newly released figures. One example being a crash on the M50 near Clondalkin involving two cars and a truck on the 2nd of December 2019 or the incident that took place on January in 2019 when a women who will remain anonymous was decapitated during a car crash near Nangor road and instead of helping some people just started recording the incident to later upload onto social media.

I feel myself and my group did a good job gathering all this information especially if you consider the fact that the decision to create a map of past car crashes was last minute and we did it in a day, however I don't have my hopes up because we only had a week left to make the actual video. It has made me realise just how different the News and journalism was before the internet. It required a lot more work and a lot more research. I hope I can learn from any mistakes we might have made while doing the project. This has also shown me how valuable a team is, I could never have managed this on my own and, I think, the project would certainly have failed without them.