Other Current Issues

Other current issues facing the media industry today:

The Digital Revolution has come. We can notice that in a scene from Spotlight, media people were using old-fashioned computers and it was still the golden age of traditional print media. With the development of the new media industry, traditional journalism has suffered from shock and faced huge challenges. In terms of how news and information are disseminated and accessed, "social" has dominated the scene. The Pew Center has launched a survey that 62% of adults in the U.S. gain news through social media (Weinberg 2016). It implies that established media outlets lose their ability to sell their goods directly to consumers. The dissemination of news is becoming monopolized by a few significant social media platforms.

Automated journalism refers to the technology to produce news automatically by computers instead of human reporters (Graefe 2016). Automated journalism is meant to be more efficient, as it is possible to create more material in less time. The Associated Press reported that the volume of profit reports from clients has surged by more than ten times as a result of their usage of automation. They can create 150 to 300 words pieces using Automated Insights software and data from other organizations in the same amount of time it takes a writer to prepare content and crunch stats (Cohen 2015).

In addition, it lowers labour expenses for journalism businesses. Less labour is approximately equal to lower costs for salaries, paid time off, holidays, and employment insurance. For journalism, the bad news is that shrinking jobs and industries in the traditional press media industry lead to less diversity of news sources (Stuart 2020). For example, news corporations soon began trimming the number of newspapers they owned (Pavlik 2010). The future of Australian news media organisations will be smaller and less profitable and will employ fewer journalists (Gomes 2018). So journalists have to face enormous work pressure while they are paid an ordinary salary, fearing the possibility of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence.