I think technology has deeply changed the way journalists gather and report information and, as a result, the way we consume news. In the past, journalists conducted more professional research, often taking longer, and distributed news in printed newspapers, while nowadays they are most of the time in competition with each other to be the first to publish articles, sacrificing the quality of the contents.          

Furthermore, consumers are so much bombarded with technological stimuli, that their attention significantly decreases and they become more and more demanding. This means they get bored more easily of long written articles and they are constantly searching for something more engaging, interactive and shorter. The motto of consumers soon became: “look for more in less time” and journalism had no other choice but to follow these new demands of people, focusing on optimizing contents and prioritizing interactions over just delivering news. These new short-form content might be different from the classic articles, but that is the only way to reach a wider audience and capture its attention.               

Talking about the way journalists have started to work, now they have access to complex information, online databases, resources and lots of digital tools, they can monitor real-time events and communicate directly with sources. Thanks to technology, they can document and get information in an easier and faster way, even though I think they have lost a bit of the curiosity that led them, until a few years ago, in  carrying on longer research.

In conclusion, given that journalism has taken hold online and news is accessible to almost everybody, some people have started publishing articles without any studies or experience. About that, I think we cannot reduce journalism as something everyone can do just by expressing opinions or reporting speeches heard from others. This democratization of journalism has not only belittled hard research work and years of studies of real journalists, but also contributed to the spread of misinformation. 

Chiara Pira