Chuck Myron, a Mobile Journalist working for news-press.com, the website of the Gannett-owned Fort Myers, Fla. News-Press, says, “Technology has made people more mobile, and journalism has to react. It’s a necessary step in the evolution of our craft, and it’s not up to us whether we want to go along. The readers have the power, and if they want to drag us from the comforts of the print world into the uncharted expanse of the Internet, they will, and it’s obvious they’re already doing it.”
Myron describes the frustrations of being on the cutting edge of much of this new technology. Chief among these is internet connectivity, which he accesses through his cell-phone’s Sprint wireless card. He says that using the wireless card allows for connectivity in a greater range of areas than a traditional WiFi connection, but that the transfer rate is still maddeningly slow.
“The connection is somewhere between dial-up and high speed, which means photos take about two or three minutes to upload.”
Obviously, this connection is still painfully slow, and the current state of technology would probably make it impractical to upload video using this method.
But technology is changing at an ever-increasing rate, and it is foreseeable that within a few years, this issue of wireless connectivity will have improved to the extent that mobile journalists posting video footage will be a real possibility.
What does this mean when considered in light of Bill Gates’ recent statement that within five years the internet, your computer, and your television will all be one and the same? (See "The Changing Face of Information Architecture in the 21st Century" below.)
In the coming weeks, I will address some of the implications for the current news media of this developing technology. If correct, my predictions are that the results will prove to be nothing short of Revolutionary.
The full text of part I of Myron’s article can be accessed here and part II here.
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