Nobody's Perfect

Convergence demands a lot of skills and the key to understanding this form of journalism requires an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. And each medium is not perfect. My medium, print, as the Convergent Journalism book says, is portable and permanent. The space provides reporters to provide readers the lowdown on the news, which is an advantage to a normal television and radio newscast, which offers only a short time for news. And because sidebar stories are a staple when a news story has a great impact on society, the space allows these kinds of articles to get published.
But As much as it has become a historical document for the day, an error in a published report can also raise credibility, editing and quality-control issues for journalists. Only in the next issue can the error be rectified but sometimes, the damage has already been done.
Television, I must say, is the most powerful medium because it combines sound, visuals and text. While print journalists toil to find the appropriate words to describe the events and setting, a powerful video can easily do the trick for television. Television best exemplifies the time element of the news. It can bring news as it happens. This brings viewers and listeners closer to the action. But television and radio also has its downsides. One, it is easy to miss and, unless you were able to record it, the information is gone, as the book says. Time constraints also prevent broadcast journalists to go deeper into the story.
The advent of technology and the never-ending demand for information of audiences has given birth to online journalism. Here, news is updated by the minutes or the hours and has unlimited space, which is better compared to a newspaper, constrained by space limitations and published once a day. Some news websites also offer newscasts so it is capable of offering the best of both worlds. It is an accepted fact, however, that it takes a lot of manpower and money to run a news website. But for a third-world country like the Philippines, online journalism is still in its early stages, probably because only a small percentage in the population of 87 million are able to access the internet.