Journalism and Technology
Journalism in one form or another has been around as long as America has been around; the Federalist Papers were nothing if not superb opinion pieces. However, journalism that seeks to be objective and fair is a newer development. It started around the beginning of the twentieth century, and had its heyday in the 1930s (Freedman, 3-12).
Then, there is a strong argument to be made that it began to wane in the 1960s, when a more opinionated and advocacy-based journalism arose alongside Tom Wolfe's literary "New Journalism." Rolling Stone and the New Yorker, among other publications, led the way toward a sort of unabashedly biased journalism; their pieces had not only an angle but an agenda that they told you about (Freedman, 14).
Now, journalism is in a kind of limbo. It is in limbo both because journalists are not sure what they are doing anymore, and because the industry is suffering. The funny thing is that both these reasons that journalism is in limbo are related to technology. There are technology-based reasons behind each shift in journalism's history, and there are technologies both fueling and fighting the difficulties faced by the industry as a business. In fact, if journalism's history can be reduced to three factors, they are demographics, law, and technology (University, Journalism).
