We are still walking alone

Each time I am invited to give a talk or a lecture about electronic journalism or the Internet, I get excited. I admit I get carried away in the true style of an evangelist who gets his audience mesmerised but the effects of his words wear out quite quickly as the audience leaves the meeting room or hall.

I have been repeating over and over ageing for years now Internet is changing the shape of the media landscape and it is not a simple development in technology or the much-hyped word “convergence”. Newspapers are not simply meeting radio and television. Hypertext-driven Internet is gobbling and then taking the place of newspapers, radio and television.

The enlightened few, and please allow some self-praise to say MaltaMedia is indeed one of these, have been harping on it since the end of the 1990s. But a voice in the desert it has been, all along.

Not that deserts are all that bare. Caravans and Bedouins are part of the desert landscape. Many live off the desert. So it is not such a bad place after all, if you can find water, or even better, a watershed.

The watershed in Malta’s history of Internet-media relations has been the launch of the first web-only news service by MaltaMedia in 1999. A few others followed with varying success. Then radios started to stream their FM broadcasts online 24/7 and newspapers started to copy their news articles online after the news agents would have sold their printed copies.

Another major development was the launch of the e-journalism category of the Malta Journalism Awards in 2003. MaltaMedia has won two out of the first three editions. Yet I am sure this category is, and will be for the foreseeable future, the Cinderella of the awards, when compared to mammoth importance attached to the print or broadcast categories, monopolised by the established media houses.

The thing that worries me most is not that online journalism is just walking its first steps, and just like any toddler, it needs to grow up to fend for itself. What worries me is that many still think of Internet in terms of new medium to ‘copy-paste’ a newspaper article or a TV news bulletin or stream a whole radio station night and day.

The intro to Toni Sant's weekly podcasts is poignant: only 6 year-old still listen to what the radios have to offer. The rest chose what they want to listen to online.

In three year’s time Internet in Malta will be a teenager, yet I feel many will still look down at it as a toddler.

It’s very easy quote examples from abroad. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of saying ‘Malta is always behind the rest of the world’.

Look at this article from the Washington Post. The most sacred of journalism awards, the Pulitzer, is waking up to the reality of online news. Steve Levingston says

Next year's Pulitzer Prize for breaking news could go to stories that appeared only on a newspaper's Web site, according to changes announced yesterday by the Pulitzer board.

As part of a series of changes, the board that oversees the most prestigious awards in journalism said it will allow newspapers to submit online-only material for consideration for the top honor in breaking news and in news photography. The board also said that online photos and stories could be included as part of submissions in all 14 journalism categories.

The shift comes as newspapers across the country are grappling with declines in print circulation as online readership is rising. Publishers and editors have boosted resources for their Web sites and beefed up their online presence while scrambling to enliven their print editions for the Internet age.

Malta’s online news and other media have to walk their own path. Things will only get more interesting with the launch of 3G mobile services next year. What should we call breaking news services on mobile or video-on-demand news bulletins on mobile phones? Let’s not mistake the wood for the trees.