There was a time when New York came to know what’s happening in London when the steamer arrived; those were the days when news moved at snails pace, the latest news was very well…stale.
Major breakthrough in the ways in which news got from one place to another came with the advent of that amazing machine…the telephone, yes, telephone, the wonder machine, transformed the way we communicate and that’s why it also played a very crucial role in the evolution of newspapers as a medium to disburse news.
Piping hot latest news became the order of the day, a necessity, for people from London to New York, from Delhi to Tokyo. That era also saw the coming to fore of dedicated news agencies. Staring with Reuters, the legendry news organization that opened up the world to all that’s fresh and latest, no news was stale news when it came to them.
The others to follow suit soon were AFP, AP, Bloomberg and all. These news agencies in a way changed the entire spectrum of things everything associated with news and its importance in the day to day lives of people around the world.
The other major tectonic shift in the way news gets served came with the advent of television. Now, you had visuals to associate news with, if someone said there’s a flood in India, you could actually see it for yourself. The association of the visual medium with the news article was lapped up by people in never seen before way.
But it wasn’t to stop there as the quantum jump was yet to come by the way of the emergence of the era of 24×7 dedicated news channels. These amazing set-ups would bring-in live visuals from across the world right into the drawing rooms. Welcome to the concept of breaking news!
Undoubtedly, the concept of breaking news broke more norms in the way news is presented and understood. Anything that’s more than five minutes old became stale, old. The mad rush to be the first amongst all those who are chasing news overrode all other considerations.
There has to be breaking news and that has to be on our channel started to be taken as the guiding principle. But all those who thought that this development would be the last milestone in media, probably, never heard of the Internet.
Internet, the all powerful, the all pervasive had made it’s entry into our common mindscape. Indeed, it was a medium like no other, with the World Wide Web there were no boundaries. It in its purest form transcended all boundaries; you just needed to be ‘logged on’ to access all the information you need.
And, it was fast too, once uploaded any content was visible all across the globe and more importantly, the reason behind its stupendous success was that most of it is free!
And, expectedly so, the first causality of this advent of a free medium was the newspapers, after all one has to buy newspapers…on the WWW the same content with lots of interactivity thrown-in was free
The concept of latest news was still there, but more importantly, news websites could positively even compete on all that’s breaking news.
Going by the speed with which Internet as a medium is evolving, it’s absolutely safe to say that the last word on how this amazing medium will transform news…transform our lives is yet to be written.
News via the World Wide Web is the way to go!