The Internet Changes Reporters' Work

The Internet has changed a reporter's life in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. Older reporters often celebrate the changes, remembering how it used to take fifteen minutes to upload a single black and white picture to a single destination using a wire machine.

That's not including the time it took to develop the film, print picture, type up a caption and paste it, with glue, on the front of the picture and attach the still damp paper to the drum of the wire machine.

We had no email. No cell phones. No personal organizers, or PDAs. To send a story to a single newspaper you had to unscrew the wires from the wall of the hotel you were in and crocodile clip your 300 baud modem into the telephone system. Then you made a single, two copper wire connection to a single destination to upload your story. If you wanted to upload a story to more than one newspaper, you had to repeat the process for each paper.

Reporters today have a different set of issues to deal with. Filing a story or a picture couldn't be easier. But the fact that your editors can contact you all the time and that your readers include the people you're reporting on, who can contact you immediately they read the story, raises some new challenges to getting the job done as Anand Giridharadas reports in the New York Times.

As if to prove the point, one of Giridharadas' readers in Singapore comments on the writer's Facebook group:

"The reported-on know what we're saying and now they can retort. They can blog about our work; post it admiringly or disparagingly on Facebook; find our e-mail addresses with a few keystrokes; comment on our Web sites to point out mistakes. "

Too many semi-colons, Mr Giridharadas, I'd have simplified the sentence. ;-)

In his article Giridharadas points out that international stories are closely watched in the countries the New York Times is covering, which has the benefit of holding reporters to a higher standard, with local bloggers becoming self appointed fact checkers, or verifyers, of every story.

At the same time the wealth of information on the internet and the flood of email and tweets raises the volume of work a reporter has to do. And the loss of a certain anonymity for a reporter traveling in a distant land must make gathering information harder.

But in the midst of the collapse of newpapers in the United States it's helpful to remember how much a reporter's job has changed since the days of unscrewing sockets in hotel walls.