CIAO DATE: 08/2013
July 2013
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
In 2012, the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded the prize for breaking news reporting to the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama for its coverage of a wave of tornados that had swept through Alabama and other southern states the previous spring. There had been hundreds of dead and missing. Buildings were smashed or lost power—and one was the paper’s printing plant. While the News was getting its operations up and running at another plant 50 miles away, it used Google Documents and social media to report on storm developments and coordinate searches for missing persons. It is an inspiring story for watchers of storms, but a depressing one for watchers of journalism—a newspaper gets praise for finding an alternative to publishing a newspaper. That, in microcosm, describes journalism’s encounter with information technology over the past decade. The efficiencies brought by open trade and the easy flow of information were revolutionizing many industries by the 1970s. It took a very long time for these developments to work their way into the journalism world, but when they arrived, they did so with a vengeance.
Resource link: The future of journalism and citizenship [PDF]