Where to start?

It has become fashionable recently to claim that traditional news media forms – newspapers, radio and television – are finished, and that the new world is all about the internet. The currency this view has gained has even reached a stage where it is suggested that knowing how to report for traditional media is no longer relevant. Not only is reporting for the internet claimed to be the only relevant form of journalism, but it is also suggested that reporting for the internet requires its own special form of journalism.

It is all nonsense, of course. Although the internet is important and is having an impact on them, traditional media are not finished just yet.

Despite fierce competition from radio, television and the net, figures show that Australians actually pay for close to 22 million metropolitan, provincial, country, rural and ethnic newspapers each week. (Audit Bureau of Circulations report 2006). And while for some of them circulations are certainly down on what they used to be, these papers contain more pages than ever. As well, an untold number of free papers are given away each week and millions still watch the news on TV and listen to it on radio. The net is a challenge for all of them but from the point of view of journalism the forms in which material appears on the internet are those same forms that exist in traditional news media.