This past week, the readings in class made me rethink the role of the media as both a distributor and a creator of the news. The media's role as a distributor is quite obvious. For many years news stations, magazines, and even most recently blogs have distributed news and information to many homes and various individuals.
When I served as an intern at WOOD TV8 in Grand Rapids (an NBC affiliate), one of the roles I played during my internship was to monitor the competition. I observed and took notes on what the other news stations in the area were distributing to their viewers. Sometimes if our competition carried a news story or if we got a tip that our competition was headed to a certain area to cover a story, our crew immediately headed out to that same location. So sometimes even before the news was distributed to the viewers, these news stories were distributed between news carriers.
But I find the role of the media as a 'creator' very interesting. When I first got interested in media and journalism, I was excited about how I would be a part of distributing stories that had not been heard before. But journalism is really changing today especially with the rise of bloggers who draw from other news sources to create their own news. These bloggers are now playing two roles- distributors and creators. I guess journalism keeps taking different twists and turns as the years go by. Will journalism end up being driven by the creators or the distributors?
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