Towards Convergence

Convergence has started to take shape in the Philippines and even in our relatively small city, Bacolod. For instance, the community newspaper that I work for has embraced the idea of having to maintain a website to cater to the needs of former Bacolod residents abroad who are unable to get a hold of a copy of our newspaper. But unlike other online news portals, like Erwin’s inq7.net, www.visayandailystar.com is not updated every few minutes but daily or sometimes once every two days depending on the work schedule of our web administrator, thus a number of emails to our site have been centered on the demand to constantly update the website.

The world has become smaller because of the rapid changes and advancements in technology, and a traditional media organization like ours also needs to keep up, merely not because of competition but to stay in the course of one of journalism’s important tenets: to deliver news fast and accurately. One particular case worth mentioning is the case of the Guardian, which is the first paper that has adapted an online-first publishing policy. Though the Guardian editor admits that the main difficulty is getting the balance right between speed and quality, she stresses that quality and accuracy are very important and should not be sacrificed or compromised.

Aside from technology, its also a profit-driven environment that has pushed media organizations to reinvent themselves with television networks and radio stations also utilizing the internet to provide information to their audience. As I had mentioned, competition has become very stiff among television networks and everyone, it seems, has been working on creating alternatives to gain an edge over the other.