And now for the news....

Rory Cellan-Jones is someone who knows what makes good T.V. journalism. His lecture provided a fascinating insight into how television news used to be and makes us even more aware of how far we’ve come with technology and how it really impacts on good journalism.

In the 80’s, there were few moving pictures to help tell a story – they heavily relied on stills to inform the report. . The video Rory showed us wasn’t that dissimilar to the portrayal of T.V. News in the film ‘Anchorman’. Thankfully this didn’t last long and we soon had moving images being used to aid the narrative of T.V. news reports.

Fast forward to 2008 though – and we now have very different tools to make the news. User generated content has been as massive factor in news broadcasters' output. Why wait for a cameraman from broadcasting house to travel twenty miles to a news story, when you could use Joe Bloggs’ pictures – who was actually at the scene? Initially anyway, this is a huge development in broadcasting – if Joe Bloggs was there first, use his material and then broadcast the quality pictures later.

Tools like Twitter enable us to break news stories quickly and for masses of people to have them pop up on their desktops instantly. In fact, during Rory’s lecture, the news broke that Roy Keane had left Sunderland. Now, without a T.V. or radio being switched on in the room, we wouldn’t have known that information. This is how people want the news to be broken to them; as it happens.

I’m not sure it would’ve really mattered if we had found this information out till after the ninety minute session though – perhaps we’re becoming a little too reliant on technology to feed us with a constant stream of information and sometimes it’s nice just to ‘switch off’. Maybe so – but at least these tools give the choice to the consumer, if they don’t want to use them, they don’t have to.

It’s been said several times during our online journalism workshops, that we don’t know in which ways news is moving – but these tools can only help rather than hinder newly trained journalists and it's something we should definitely embrace.