Journalism is the profession of writing or communicating, formally employed by publications and broadcasters, for the benefit of a particular community of people.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism)

New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media)


How the Use of New Media negatively impacts Journalism?

New media is related to journalism in many ways. One of the ways is using the internet to publish news. The main purpose of journalism is to provide people with important social and political news. In the past, journalism is done through the television, radio and newspaper. Now, people turn to the internet to search for news. This greatly lowers the quality of journalism.

So now the question is how does it lower the quality of journalism?

In the old days, publishing a news required large investments and this alone makes the source reliable. Now, internet is readily available to anyone with a computer and internet connection and this makes the source of news unreliable. You cant believe everything on the internet because the source may not come from a professional journalist. Whenever i read the news on the internet, many questions come to mind. For example, "Where did it come from?" or "Can I trust that it is original?" etc.

One of the most common thing that people read is celebrity gossip. There are many websites on celebrity gossip like JustJared, PerezHilton, Celebrity-Gossip etc. All these websites have almost similar content which poses as a danger that once something is on the Internet, it tends to be accepted as a fact and repeated many times. The audience will start to believe the content on the website because they see multiple articles on the same issue from many different websites.

Internet-based news can also result in the loss of originality. People are constantly competing with the rest of the internet users, which may lead to plagiarism. Many websites post almost exact stories, some sites even replicated the newspaper online. This clearly shows that a loss of originality is present.

To sum it all up, there are many causes on how the use of new media can negatively impact journalism. Firstly, everyone wants to be the first to publish new information. Secondly, the web tends to be a place where opinion is preferred over careful and unbiased reporting. This resulted in the posting of some very hateful comments on the web. Thirdly, internet-based news still do not provide the kind of expensive and in-depth journalism that mainstream media have done.