Its days like this that really make me stop and ponder the future of journalism as we know it. By noon today, if you hadn’t watched President Barack Obama’s inauguration live on television, you probably read about it on the Internet, saw photographs of the estimated 1.4 million people in the crowd via Yahoo! or watched Obama’s entire inaugural address on YouTube.
That’s the business of news today - today being a keyword here. The immediacy of the World Wide Web has and continues to change the way we get our news. It isn’t a day old anymore by the time we get the full story --- it’s up to date and late breaking.
Yet I guarantee come tomorrow, the majority of front page headlines will read something like this: “The dream realized,” or “Change has come” or something to that affect. The story will more than likely focus on the happenings of yesterday - the inauguration - instead of focusing on tomorrow - in-depth analysis of what lies ahead.
Now I’m not saying all news outlets are going to fall into this routine. But truth be told, some mediums just can’t let go of yesterday’s news and how we report it. Let’s face it, by the time we open up those newspapers tomorrow (if we even read the newspaper at all) it’ll be filled with the things we already know rather than the things we should be thinking about.
Let’s hope, for industry’s sake, that changes.
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