Date: Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Is the the future of news reporting on the Internet?

With the latest phenomenon, presidency candidates giving interviews on YouTube, questions are being asked as to whether this is the path news reporting is set to take in years to come. Hillary Clinton, along with all the other eight members of the US Democratic candidacy recently took part in a shared CNN - YouTube initiative, the first of its kind, in which everyday American citizens were invited to pose questions on YouTube to the candidates to be answered live in a broadcast debate with the politicians. Although there was still some mediation from the ‘old media’ forum of CNN who moderated which questions would be answered, experts are hailing this breakthrough as an indicator of the way news will be reported as time progresses. Research shows that already 15% of US citizens use the internet as their main source of political information, and this is likely to be set to rise in the future. However, other less supportive commentators believed that the importance attached to the online debate was more to do with the hype surrounding it than to its actual intrinsic worth in political news reporting. Only time will tell if the internet is going to play a pivotal role in the way news is disseminated to the public, but the latest figures suggest it is possible. Millions of people tuned in to see this debate, both on air an online, opening up the world of politics to many who would not normally be interested. Experts are also saying that the increase in use of online resources in news reporting would be likely to get more individuals, such as younger people, interested and involved in the world around them, than the traditional print and television methods would. Already candidates in the presidency race have been setting up online video-sharing sites and joining social networking pages in the bid to increase their support from the internet-based masses, and predictions indicate that this is the way political news, as well as everyday news, will now be reported to the world in the future, in the era of the media age.



Sources: Times Online, BBC News,