1. Student no: s13161812 Reflective Response to Reading – Week 3 MED4105
1 | P a g e
Gemma Harris
The key argument of the author in week three’s reading is that the changes in technology
could improve journalism for the better and in fact the crisis may not lie within just
journalism but companies not evolving with the technological advances.
An important point is technological changes mean certain things within the journalism
industry have also changed such as the closer relationship between producer, other sources,
and consumer and the increasingly wide availability of information. A concept that helped
me understand this was an overview of one new toolavailable ‘Crowdsourcing and User-
Generated Content’. Costeltoe claims “It is not new; it grew to what it is now” suggesting
due to the development of technology, primarily within social networking sites that enable
sharing, journalists obtaining information from the public, and from other sources, has
increased (Van Der Haak and Parks et al., 2012, p. 2928). While some may argue this is bad
as credibility may decrease, the reading implies this is good for journalists as they can gather
information closer to the issue; good professional journalists can determine which
information is more reliable obtaining more credible perspectives.
Crowdsourcing is existing in a variety of media organisations, due to technology
innovation,such as Hootsuite, a site that interacts with social media and allows journalists to
obtain specific news feeds from all social networking sites in one place and so they have
access to publicly produced information easily.
New technology has also changed theorganisational structure of media organisationsand
their production processes; therefore, audiences receive media products differently from
previous eras. For example, atheory ‘the long tail’ by Chris Anderson suggests due to the
increase of online retail it has enabled “the non-hits to expand to the extent that they

2. Student no: s13161812 Reflective Response to Reading – Week 3 MED4105
2 | P a g e
Gemma Harris
economically outweigh hits” meaning audiences have wider access to a range of products
that were not previously available in traditional processes. (Long and Wall, 2012, p. 198).
Organisational processes have changedto collaborate with audiences more “detailed
audience information can facilitate later stages of the production process by giving the
audience input into production decisions” (Musburger and Kindem, 2009, p. 2).
In conclusion, I’ve understood that changes in technology causes changes within the
structure and processes of media organisations such as the involvement of audiences and
receiving of media products. Therefore, a new investigation could be“How do the changes in
organisational structures, due to technological advancements, have an impact on the
relationship between journalists and PR professionals?”I could also investigate “How has
this, consequently, affected the distribution of media products their meaning?” A suitable
methodology would be an ethnography of journalism and PR organisational structures and
their production and distribution processes.

3. Student no: s13161812 Reflective Response to Reading – Week 3 MED4105
3 | P a g e
Gemma Harris
Bibliography:
Long, P. and Wall, T. 2012. Media studies. 2nd ed. Harlow, England: Pearson
Musburger, R. B. and Kindem, G. A. 2009. Introduction to media production. Amsterdam
[u.a.]: Focal Press/Elsevier.
Van Der Haak, B., Parks, M. and Castells, M. 2012. The future of journalism: Networked
journalism.International Journal of Communication, 6 p. 2928.