Understanding the media: Part III
By Brian D. Spano
Brian Spano Communications, LLC
http://www.brianspano.com

Internet
For the Internet, we will look at publication Websites, blogs and the explosion of social media, as these have risen in popularity over the last few years.

Like the broadcast medium, the Internet is an immediate news source with stories posted in a matter of moments, and one difference here over the print medium is that when a mistake is made, it can be corrected within a few seconds. A newspaper may take a day or several days to correct a mistake, while a magazine could take a week or even a month to correct a mistake.

Online stories can reach expansive audiences around the world at lower costs. As technology continues to evolve, experts are calling the Web the major news source for most people. Many times stories from print and broadcast are posted on Web sites.

Almost all newspapers and magazines have their own Website. Some require you to subscribe to the print version before you can access the online version. Then there are publications that are only Web-based and do require a fee to access. An example of this is the mutual fund Web site Ignites.com. It covers the mutual fund industry and investment-related issues and is solely available online for a fee. It is primarily targeted to mutual fund industry insiders; however, it picks up wire stories and mainstream print stories for its site that all relate to its target audience.

Blogs are also on the rise and are written by pretty much anyone with an opinion and a computer these days. They are usually short opinion pieces about an event, news item, person or any particular subject the blogger deems important to them. There are several types of blogs including: personal, media, corporate and genre. Most legitimate blogs are attached to a legitimate news source; however, there are many rogue blogs out there that can say pretty much anything they want about anything they want, and those can be hard to find and track.

Many bloggers, particularly those engaged in participatory journalism, differentiate themselves from the mainstream media, while others are members of that media working through a different channel. Some institutions see blogging as a means of "getting around the filter" and pushing messages directly to the public. Some critics worry that bloggers respect neither copyright nor the role of the mass media in presenting society with credible news. Many mainstream journalists are now writing their own blogs.

Finally, there are the social media sites, i.e. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Today, many people are getting their “news” from one of these sites because it can be delivered in short, concise bits that doesn’t take the end-user long to read, digest and relate. Nearly every celebrity, politician, news organization, entertainment outlet, etc. is connected through at least Facebook or Twitter, and the follower’s of each site seems to grow by the tens of thousands each day. As these sites continue to grow in popularity, there is no telling where or what it will lead to in the future.