Journalism Challenges

Broadcast journalism faces many different challenges nowadays, which influence the work of the journalists and make them adapt to the new changes and audience’s demands. According to the custom essays, the journalistic sphere is transforming due to the technological changes and the growing expectations of the public as well as new possibilities and trends. In this situation, broadcast journalists are the ones feeling the transformations and challenges the fastest since their work sphere relies deeply on the technological progress and popular tendencies. Broadcast industry and journalists face many challenges, such as developing new relations with the audience, relying and cooperating with the social networks’ and their tools, keeping pace with information flow, becoming more interactive and engaging while also fighting with the fake information. These challenges define the modern broadcast journalism and the professionals in the sphere, and their analysis is of major importance for the practitioners in the field.

The first key challenge but at the same time an opportunity is the increasing influence of citizen journalism over the current broadcast media sphere. The audience no longer takes a role of a passive receiver who simply gets the information without having any input or influence over the content. Instead, the average consumers now are taking an active role in informing people and creating an information society. Citizen journalism platforms are becoming more popular; they provide people with an opportunity to share the news and contribute to the general informing process. In a way, the consumers have become the informers themselves, and that means that the broadcasters have to adapt to the new reality and incorporate the citizens into their work. A good example is the work of BBC, where the producers use the materials provided to them by activists and not professional journalists. They allow the outsiders who do not have a previous work experience with the company to send some reports and articles about the hot topics and events and then share them through media channels. In this situation, the media can receive the information they would not be able to get themselves since the journalists are not always allowed or able to do so; the activists also get an opportunity to share worthy information pieces with large audiences and make certain information known. The challenge for broadcast journalists, however, lies in finding the right sources which can be trusted, provide balanced information and determine the news the media are to share with the public.

Checking the information in this situation is another key challenge. It is also caused by the social networks and the increasing popularity of these platforms. The people publish a lot of interesting news via their Facebook pages or other social media accounts. Sometimes, the journalists can even start investigations or find the proof they lacked for their stories simply by navigating social networks and scrolling through social profiles of different users. Nevertheless, the flow of information is so large that it is almost impossible to check everything or determine whether a particular information found on Facebook can be trusted. The broadcast journalists work in a very fast environment since they have to update the news feed regularly, and, therefore, sometimes they must rely on such sources as social networks. If they do not update the information, they risk losing to their rivals, but if they do, there is always a possibility that the information may be fake or not accurate. Therefore, checking the sources and the content of information is an increasing challenge for broadcast journalists since the environment they are working in becomes more dynamic and they need to make sure they are spreading the truthful information immediately.

Convergence is another challenge the broadcast journalism faces. The growing demands of consumers make the broadcast journalists adapt and produce more multimedia pieces which incorporate different channels. The audience gets more interactive long reads, which include podcasts, videos, animation, pictures, and sometimes even elements of the abovementioned social network tools. These stories are far more engaging than the previous radio shows or television broadcasts, but they require more resources, time, and skills from the journalists. The media experts have to possess profound skills in different journalistic tools since they should not only produce texts, but also be able to take pictures, edit videos and audios, create animation and work with photo editing programs, and so on. Also, due to the dynamics of the sphere, they have a very limited time to produce their stories while having more tasks. This is a challenge the journalists face thanks to the technological developments and because of the growing competition and the fact that the major media outlets are moving into an online sphere and transforming into convergent platforms. Therefore, if the media do not transform toward more multimedia outlets, they risk falling behind the competitors and major trends.

The interactivity and communication with the consumers is also a key challenge. It was discussed above that the role of the audience is changing in many ways because people nowadays produce content themselves; however, the changes are true even when the consumers simply read or watch the content without contributing to its creation. The broadcast journalism now has a lot of room for feedback, so people can influence the content in many different ways apart from creating it. The number of likes, shares and comments is one example which shows how people’s interest determines the topics media cover and work with. The public interest can stimulate the media report about particular topics which they could ignore otherwise; but the very same interest can have a negative impact since the media may ignore other topics because of lack of public demand. The latter, however, may not necessarily mean that the topic is not important, but the journalists may still disregard some themes and news simply because they may be less popular or appealing to the general audience. The question of topic selection becomes very timely in this situation because with the constant information flow, the journalists need to make quick decisions on what they want to report about. The selectiveness of information influences the people’s perception of the world, so when the journalists deliberately leave particular issues out considering them less important, they may be changing or even manipulating people’s attitudes and knowledge toward different world events.

The information wars and the necessity to develop an effective strategy to overcome them is another challenge yet to solve for broadcast journalists. It was mentioned earlier that sometimes journalists have to rely on such controversial sources as social networks or activists sending particular information. There is always risk to receive fake or crooked information the journalists cannot check. However, there are many attempts to deliberately falsify the information by big organizations and even government bodies. For example, in such countries as Russia and China, there is a huge pressure on journalists, who are often prevented from honest-reporting. Therefore, they have to falsify the information and spread fakes through media; otherwise, they may be persecuted by the government. The journalists from the other media outlets, on the other hand, have to deal with the fake information their colleagues produce and differentiate the truth from reality. It may be very difficult when the fakes are being spread by other media outlets and seemingly trusted sources, so broadcast journalists have difficulties working with loads of information. The new technologies opened new possibilities for fakes since now it is possible to produce more believable stories, videos, and data while misinforming the audiences. The major problem connected to this issue is that the biggest media corporations do not have clear or effective strategies to battle fake information, and they often fall victims to falsified news. Although there are many methods to check the information, the fakes still have a big influence over the information flow since various media outlets lack resources for hiring fact checkers, which affects the trustworthiness of their news. Therefore, the necessity to have a clear strategy against fakes is a major challenge for the broadcast journalism since such strategy is not working at the moment.

Thus, the broadcast journalists are facing increasing challenges today. They are connected to the technological changes, which provide more opportunities, but also require more skills and resources from the journalists. The transformations also make it more difficult for the journalists to keep pace with the information flow since they have to check the different sources while updating the information in a timely manner and distancing themselves from fakes which are spread out in the Internet. Working and engaging the consumers of information is another challenge since people demand more the media outlets, and the journalists compete not only through the content they produce, but also the speed and innovative features of their materials. These many challenges complicate the work of broadcast journalists while preparing them for a new convergent era, in which journalists need to be able to work with all kinds of media in a professional manner and satisfy the customers’ demands via technological opportunities.