Entitlement: Will it be the death of the Journalist?

One hundred years ago, the human race didn't need so much as a telephone to get by. These days, our dependency on technology is rapidly increasing. From downloading movies to doing your groceries, the internet has become integrated into our everyday lives in a big way.

When the internet first became an everyday thing, it was mainly used for emails and looking things up. Then came the dawn of the social networking age. Facebook and Myspace became all the rage, and people started creating more content than ever, more than doubling the information that was available on the internet. Then in 2006, social networking was changed forever when Twitter came along.

Although it took a couple of years to take off, the 140 character “micro blog”, as it is referred to, took off in a huge way. With a staggering 520’250’000 users world-wide and over one-hundred and eighty million tweets a day, twitter has become one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Its #search method has also enable journalists to have a quicker, more efficient way to get news of the day. However, this also means that the public also had a quicker, more efficient way to get the news, that didn't involve the newspaper or journalists.

Long before Twitter however, newspapers had begun to upload their stories on to the internet for free. Although this is nothing new in the virtual world, paying for that news is. Media watch covered this in their article "Paying for the news".

Most people will only pay for their news if it’s in a newspaper and according to a survey conducted online, eighty-six percent of people would not be willing to pay for their online news. Much like a young child who was given “free” jelly beans and then told to pay for them after eating some, the public has reacted in much the same manner. They believe that they are entitled to their share of free news. Hence why only a measly fourteen percent stated that they would be willing to pay five dollars per month to receive their news online.  So what does this mean for the future of journalism?

With speculations that newspapers could soon be a thing of the past, the journalism world is in panic mode. Whilst it would have seemed like a brilliant idea at the time to upload the daily news onto the internet available to the public for free, many newspapers are having doubts about their “brilliant” idea.

This completely unforeseen situation has a name.

It’s called “Amara’s law” and focuses on “… overestimat[ing] the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate[ing] the effect in the long run”, which perfectly sums up what’s happening right now.  If the public continue to refuse to pay for their online news and continue to source it from Twitter and Facebook, then the journalism profession may become a thing of the past. But how long would the world last without it’s journalists there to tell the world’s people about what’s going on around them? Only time will tell.