New Forms of Media Publishing

source: Google

The mainstream media (print-based text) is now challenged by new forms of media publishing (multimodal text) including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and alternative online newspaper. Based on a survey done by the Pew project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of respondents get news online, 10% of them only read newspaper and the rest read news online and newspaper (O’Dell, 2011). This showed that the ‘textual shift’ (Walsh, 2006) has altered our communication nowadays.

What is ‘textual shift’? It means our literacy change due to our environment is full of visual, electronic and digital texts today (Walsh, 2006). This has affected the traditional journalism as people switched from mainstream media to new form of media publishing, which provide unlimited and unhidden information.

Mainstream media (print-based text)

source: Google 

New forms of media publishing (multimodal text)

source: Google

Twitter

source: Google

Twitter has altered the roles of traditional journalism as ‘twitter had ‘broken’ the story before the mainstream media had own even altered their regular programming’ (Berkowitz, 2008). There was an example showed Twitter reached out to people faster. Twitter first released the death of Michael Jackson before it was confirmed by the mainstream media news (Munk, 2009). On the other hand, research showed that 60% of bloggers and 36 % of online reporters use Twitter to search for stories (Rao, 2010).

Affordance means ‘what is made possible by the modes used’ (Walsh, 2006). The affordance of Twitter is it allows multimodal text with 140 characters as status update. We can update readers right after we get something new. Based on the examples and reasons above, the emergence of new media ecosystem has altered the way we communicate.

References:

• Berkowitz, L 2008, US: Twitter, the new breaking news warning system, editorsweblog.org, viewed 23 August 2011, <http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2008/05/us_twitter_the_new_breaking_news_warning.php>
• Munk, S 2009, Micheal Jackson death covered first by Twitter, crashes servers, Electricpig, viewed 23 August 2011, <http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/06/26/michael-jackson-death-covered-first-by-twitter-crashes-servers/>
• O'Dell, J 2011, For the first time, more people get news online than from newspaper, Mashable, viewed 23 August 2011, <http://mashable.com/2011/03/15/online-versus-newspaper-news/>
• Rao, L 2010, Study: 52 percent of bloggers consider themselves journalist, TechCrunch, viewed 23 August 2011, <http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/study-52-percent-of-bloggers-consider-themselves-journalists/>
• Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': examing the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, pp24-37.