Friday 29 April 2016

Emerging trends in news dissemination

After gathering news and editing, journalists have the responsibility of making it available to the audience and this is news dissemination. There are various emerging trends in news dissemination but first its better to understand how it was done before.
For print media, traditional news papers did not have any colors except black and white for both pictures and texts. This was hectic especially when printing photographs from film cameras, it involved  chemical route and films were not supposed to be exposed to light because it would affect them causing picture distortion.
 Digital technologies such as quark have helped to improve newspaper production and revolutionize news presentation for newspapers where texts and pictures are well composed, colored and presentable to the readers. It has also increased speed and saving time thus journalists are able to beat time to avoid presenting stale news.
In radio, news dissemination was done in only one radio station, voice of Kenya which is KBC today. The frequency was amplitude modulation AM, which was greatly affected by weather and mountains causing voice distortion. Presenters used handwritten scripts to present news and actualities were recorded by analogue recorders which sometimes would not play due to the problem of wear and tear.
Today news dissemination in radio is done using digital mechanisms such as digital recorders for actualities and digital software such as adobe audition with use of computers and sound boosts which have improved news presentation practice.
There are various radio stations with frequent modulation FM signals which are heard loud and clear by the audience such as Kameme radio, radio Citizen, Classic 105 among others. The audience are also given opportunity to send comments during news presentation via social media and SMS lines which has promoted journalists-audience interaction.
News dissemination in TV was also done using black and white images and it was only one TV station-KBC. The house style of this station was that each news bulletin would start by the story of the then President Daniel Arap Moi since it was a government station. It didn't matter what Moi has done but his story should come first.
News anchors read scripts manually with no autocues and cameras were analogue which used tapes and produced black and white video footages.
Today news presentation in TV is done in several TV stations such as NTV, KTN which was the first private TV station among others. These stations use digital signals to disseminate news and audience are able to get clear, crispier and colored pictures.
Presenters use autocues to disseminate news and cameras are digital with  high definition(HD) formats producing clear colored images to the audience.
Audience are also given chance to interact with news presentation where they send comments via social media and SMS lines where these comments are read and published on air. This has improved audience gratification thus developing audience loyalty to the very station where their comments are read and published.
Online Journalism is another major emerging trend in news dissemination. Social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, instagram among others are used by journalists to disseminate news to the audience who are given the respective accounts to log on and get news.
Also world wide web(www) is another internet platform used by journalists to disseminate news. Audience are supposed to just click the website of various media stations and get the news online. Internet also provide links where readers can get background information concerning any news item. 

No comments:

Post a Comment