We’ve seen how tablets and computers have taken over printed newspapers. Physical circulation of the news worldwide has come to a point of near obsolesce. News gets to us is so many different ways, we’ve lost count. Everywhere we look now, there’s a brand new piece of information. We don’t need to spend whatever single digit money for paper that will even smudge your fingers before you can get half way through the information. So, having stated the obvious here, you would obviously say journalism is dead isn’t it? WRONG.
Journalism is not dead. What might be though, are the millions of acres of trees that had to be cut down to distribute news that just as soon as they were printed, they were already outdated (but that’s another matter). Anyway, it’s not dead because, well, how did the information reach you in the first place? Regardless of the method it reached your eyes or ears, information had to be gathered, photographed, written and shared with the world.
Journalists, as this articles puts it http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/curation-journalism/, are the new curators. The gathering, collection and the very logic of a piece of news coming your way has to be run through someone. True, anyone can do it; amateur videos, bloggers (like yours truly), etc can distribute news as well. Think of it as crowd sourcing the news.
It is definitely cheaper and a thousand times more efficient to have local people share their news as it is to send correspondents around the world only for them to be late for the moment. In any case, news generally happens at unexpected times in unexpected locations. All the more, even as we all have ourselves as local distributors, we still need the pros.
For all of it to make sense, there must be a certain order to things, even writing skills if you will. So no, journalism is not dead, it just got crowd sourced and refined.