History and Overview

The state of journalism has changed immensely in the past decade. Ten years ago, it really was just print and broadcast. Nielsen reported on December 31st, 2000 that there were 108,096,800 in North America alone. Today, there are 266,224,500 internet users. That is 146.3% growth between 2000 and 2010. In the world, internet population grew 444.8%. That is an enormous amount of potential for expansion into the digital world. Ten years ago, the internet was beginning to boom. The year 2000 was right in the middle of the “dot-com bubble,” which saw stocks values rise due to growth in the internet. At this time, if you wanted news, the main places where you could get it were on TV, newspapers, magazines, and the radio.
Now think about how far journalism has come since the invention of the internet. Ten years ago the internet still existed. If you woke up and wanted to know what the weather was going to be like for the week, you could still go online and look, granted the connection speed was still pretty slow. If it was 1960, you would have to get a newspaper to find out. That was pretty much the only way to find out. And if you wanted the hard news, you really had the option of watching the evening news or read the evening edition of a newspaper.
Here is a brief history of technology in journalism: In the 1930’s radio was the dominant medium for news and during the 40’s, the Federal Communication Commission forbade the creation of new radio and television stations during war time. The 50’s saw the rise of television, giving new opportunities in advertising. By 1960, 90% of American’s owned television sets. The 80’s saw a rise in the magazine industry. Magazines were able to set a specific interest directed at specific audiences, causing many newspapers to flop as production costs rose. This was also when the internet was first born
All news stations like CNN and Fox News did not even emerge until the 80’s and 90’s, so before that, evening news stations really were really at the top of the news pyramid. Today if you want news, your options of where to go are pretty much endless. You’ve got CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, CSPAN, and more on TV. Even if you watch MTV, every so often you get bombarded in the middle of a commercial break with news breaks (see, even MTV cares about keeping the youth up to date on current events). You can pull out any cell phone made in the past 3 years with that has internet access and use any sort of news app, making information available pretty much anywhere that you have bars. You have social networking sites such as facebook and twitter where your own friends and peers have the capability of posting their own takes on the news. You have endless amounts of blogs where citizens are able to report their opinions on various different topics from politics to entertainment. The history of journalism continues to write itself in a very interesting manner.

Sources: http://history.journalism.ku.edu/1990/1990.shtml
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm