How has news changed in the last 20 years?

How has news changed in the last 20 years?

Context:

During the last 20 years, the news industry has evolved in a way that many would say is quite unprecedented. With things such as the decline of actual newspapers and emergence of mobile devices including phones and tablets, the news has changed in a way that it's more accessible than we ever knew it to be. E-media sticks out here in particular with it not only allowing consumers to have another platform to access news on, but also to report their own on this same platform. It can be said that this was to the detriment of institutions but at the same time, others would suggest that their hold on the industry has merely remained the same.

Audience

• Citizen journalism sticks out as one of the main benefits for audiences of the changes that have occurred within news after the past 20 years. As put by journalism.about.com, 'citizen journalism is when private individuals do essentially what private reporters do - report information' which is 'usually found online.' Equipped with cameraphones, members of the general public can report random yet potentially notable things happening in front of them that perhaps couldn't have at all anticipated. Examples of this lie in the cases of police brutality that have occurred over the past few years including the death of Eric Garner and Alton Sterling. We see these deaths actually take place within videos shot by bystanders and with them we got a lot more of a inside look into some of the pure injustices going on, showing the significance that a feature like citizen journalism could have
• As a continuation of the point that citizen journalism has benefited audiences in that people can report on major ongoing issues, it's also granted them a platform for them to start their own publications whether it be through blogs or video-sharing as a way to spread news. We see this with YouTube channels such as DJ Akademiks for example. Providing commentary to the events that take place within the hip hop industry, the individual behind the channel has been referred to as being 'hip-hop's one man TMZ,' representative of the fact it can now take only a single individual to reach the feats of more major news publishers
• From an access point of view, news has changed in the sense that people are more likely than ever to access stories through social media rather than an actual newspaper. According to the Digital News Report 2016 carried out by Reuters, 51% of people with online access use social media as a news source. With the penetration the Internet has been making into homes across the world, this shows increasingly how access to the news through e-media is not coming to a stop anytime soon while more traditional platforms like print are on the decrease

Institution

• From an institutional standpoint, it could be said that firms in the news industry have suffered over the last 20 years due to to services like Google and Facebook. It has meant that billions in advertising revenue has went to the online services as oppose to the physical newspapers and has even resulted in journalists at these publications losing their jobs. Publications such as The Independent have even gone as far as completely shunning newspapers for a digital-only approach instead
• It could be said that news institutions haven't felt much of a change as a result of the emergence of the Internet and rather just have to adapt to the differences attached with. According to Herman and McChesney (1997) the market power of media giants won't be affected that much at all by the emergence of the Internet and perhaps this is true. Companies such as News Corp continue to have huge significance in the news industry, with or without the digital revolution so it could be said that news hasn't changed that much at all and things like citizen journalism don't have as much of an impact as we make it out to be - e.g. Daily Mail and General Trust earning a revenue of £1.86BN in 2014 alone