CNN iReport

Shoshana Zuboff, author of In The Age of the Smart Machine, describes “informating” as “the process that translates descriptions and measurements of activities, events and objects into information. By doing so these activities become visible to the organization”. This is precisely what journalists and the media have been doing for decades – making “the organization,” or, the general public, aware of “activities, events and objects.” With the dawn of the Internet over the past two decades, the media industry has found itself becoming informated, with quicker, easier access to news and information. John V. Pavlick, author of Journalism and New Media, believes that the changes going on in journalism are “the most fundamental since the rise of the penny press of the mid-nineteenth century”. Mr. Pavlick sees the Internet and other new media transforming the nature of news content, the way journalists do their work and the structure of the newsroom. This transformation will also bring about an unprecedented amount of transparency in the media, which in turn will include the public in the relay of information in new and innovative ways. In this column, I will be examining these new processes of relaying information and how they affect the industry as a whole.

II “Pre-informated” Media

Before the age of the Internet, those that released news and information to the public were able to censor it. These organizations were namely newspaper companies, and, one could argue, the government (but that is a different topic for discussion). The only things people knew about were what lay on their front stoop each morning. Compared to the Internet, this distribution of information was slow and expensive. The only news that could be covered was what fit on the pages. Even still, aside from the mostimportant news, the majority of what was written about generally was of local interest. Even advertisements tended to deal with local businesses.

With newer (than paper) mediums, such as radio and television, the flow of information was still narrow. There were few channels and stations, and what was available had a relatively specific focus. These methods of relaying information did not favor the user, as they lasted a predetermined amount of time (such as the 6 o’clock evening news in the 1970’s), or did not provide more than mere summaries of stories (as was the case in radio broadcasts in the 1930’s and 40’s).