Experimenting with New Media for Journalism

New media are maturing, and it is increasingly evident that they wield great influence on traditional journalism as we find it in newspapers, radio and TV news programmes. The present article1 deals with two strengths of the new media: their affordance of public participation through the aid of two-way interfaces, and their affordance of greater accuracy in news reporting due to computer-assisted information gathering. We believe that researchers should engage actively with these new potentials for communication. Technologies should be considered to contain an orientation towards change that can be harnessed by academic research teams as well as by industry laboratories (see Nyre 2009 for the complete argument). The tendency to inspire or induce change in society has always been a strong aspect of new technologies (Winston 1998). Although new technological set-ups routinely create new opportunities for (journalistic) action, this does not necessarily mean that they are investigated systematically, with a clear intention to test our specified communicative procedures. During the 40-50 years in which the information society has been a precise label for the Nordic countries, most of the new technical inventions have not been tested systematically by researchers. For every 100 inventions, there are five or ten that become success stories in the marketplace or civil society, and ninety that are never given a real chance.