When Ken Sands started his journalism career he would do his typing on a manual typewriter. “Now we have people blogging with camera enabled Blackberrys,” Sands said during a presentation to George Mason University students. The online publisher for CQ Politics has come a long way from his typewriter.
Pegged as one of the leading innovators of online journalism, Ken Sands, I snow leading the way in new ways to make journalism he has brought online journalism from one-way information, to online community bulletin boards, to the dynamic, interactive realm we see today.
A proponent of civic journalism Sands was one of the first to use the input of readers to make unique stories that strayed from what he see as unoriginal “pack journalism.” He compiled a list of online readers of the newspaper where he worked in Washington state. Directly after 9/11 he sent an email out to the list of people, who responded with personal accounts, thoughts and experiences, after the tragedy putting a creative spin on the story everyone was covering.
There are some key aspects of online journalism that are central only to this form of news writing and reporting, because, according to Sands, it is “not just a different platform, you can do better journalism.
- Immediacy of the internet allows journalists to update stories as they occur. A story can be posted as it is breaking and can be constanly updated with live blogging from odd angles of a story. Sands points out, though, that live blogging can lose long term value most of the time when it is a simple log of events because of the length and lack of storyline.
- Interactivity, when people can connect with the journalist and other readers by posting comments or having live discussions.
- Multimedia enhances and helps tell the story in a different way. Databases offer a visual representation of data, as well as the use pictures and videos, video blogging , or even animated political cartoons.
- Aggregation websites such as MySpace and Facebook allow users to choose functions that keep them updated and/or allow them to interact and discuss issues and current events in a way never before possible.
By using, these and other form of the internet Ken Sands shows how journalism has evolved and become better and more accurate because people can offer input and hold journalists personally responsible. With all the changes that have already happened Sands stresses that as new technology is developed journalism will continue to develop and grow with it.
Back to Video Conference Stories