Right now, newspapers and magazines all over the country are struggling financially. As a result, they are cutting staff and publishing smaller papers. There is, quite simply, less news out there than there was. And the reason for these financial struggles is typically said to be the internet: people now get their news online for free, rather than on paper for money, and advertising revenue from the internet isn't as lucrative as advertising revenue from the pages of a hardcopy paper.
But the truth is that newspapers and other media outlets have been in decline in terms of quantity and quality of output for quite some time. A study conducted in 2006 in Britain, for example, showed that journalism's only problem isn't technology. A survey of 2,207 items in the Guardian, The Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph and the mid-market Daily Mail showed that news sources have come to rely to an alarming degree on public relations and news agency materials (Lewis).
One must wonder: what are the technologies and strategies used by contemporary journalists, and how do they jive (or not jive) with the ultimate enterprise that is journalism?
