So, with regards to broadcast media, it’s pretty obvious to see that digital technology (bluetooth/mobile phones/blackberries/satellites/all the other things we’ve been talking about) has helped to improve their broadcasts.The “Updated Every Minute” BBC advert shows how up-to-date that particular organization sees itself to be. I’m not convinced it’s especially improved press freedom – it might have made reports more accurate, getting to the audience much faster, but, in the context of the UK, I don’t think it’s made much difference to press freedom.
One thing I think we’ll struggle to demonstrate is how digital technology has improved printed press freedom/affected printed press. While newspapers now have websites, that seems to be the extent of their use of digital technology. I might well be wrong. Print journalists can email their reports to their editor from a press conference/court case. But their deadlines are less immediate than in broadcast, so has this made any difference at all?
(I found a Cypriot newspaper which has now launched an international version of their paper thanks to the internet. http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:-265HnZZHpUJ:www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html%3Fcountry%3D/KW0001/KW0003/KW0055/%26year%3D2000+digital+technology+improving+press+freedom&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=uk )
I’ll ask the Zimbabwean journalist I’m talking to this week. And the two BBC jounos I’m talking to. Any chance one of you could do a phono (or live if it’s a local paper – film it?) with a print journalist, asking if they think digital technology has improved press freedom in print journalism, or whether it’s just made their stories more convenient to file?
Are we including editing tools in this? Adobe Audition/whatever it is we use to edit video mean that we don’t have to sit and slice up tape anymore. It’s digital. It’s faster. But that means we can play with what people say more…so does this improve freedom, or make us more tempted to edit their words, changing their meaning, going in the opposite direction to freedom? (Maybe find an example of one naughty programme/paper/station that cut out a “not” from a sentence, changingthe meaning of what someone’s said?) We could also record one of us saying one thing, then edit it to say something completely different – showing how it can be abused?
Same with photo journalism. Digital technology makes it easier to fake photos. Or maybe we could just do a section on how digital technology has been abused?
Now we know what our topic REALLY is, I was thinking we could use digital technology as part of the presentation, and have one or more of us presenting from afar, via phone, live video link, etc. We’d need to enlist techno-help, but I think it’s do-able!
LC
