Television News in The United States - Current Development

Current Development

As the Internet become more prevalent in American lives, television news operations learn to adapt and embrace new technologies. Today, most television news operations would publish the text of the stories aired during their newscasts on their websites. Some of them, including all the network and national cable news operations, post videos of the stories for visitors to their websites. Some anchors, reporters, and notable news programs also have blogs that take viewers behind the scenes of their news operation or provide a forum for either the personalities or viewers to air their opinions. In recent years, these news outlets have also provided an avenue for amateurs with digital or mobile phone cameras to send video created by them to be used in the broadcast and website. Television journalists are acquiring skills for the convergence between television and the Internet. Social media has also become a fixture on the news as most networks, news programmes and key personalities maintain Facebook and Twitter accounts to let viewers get late breaking news, find out what's going on behind the scenes, as well as give comments and questions.

Technological advancement is also changing the ways news is gathered and edited. The newsreel days are long gone. Reporters do not use film anymore. Television journalists are capturing images and sound on video and DV. Some stations even begin gathering and reporting news in high-definition television. Even editing and archiving systems are evolving, as more and more stations convert to non-linear editing systems, and storing file footage on computer servers rather than tapes.

With digital cable comes on-demand news programming. News operations slowly begin to feel the burden to generate news content on a 24-hour news cycle, while keeping material fresh on their regularly scheduled newscasts. This means around-the-clock coverage. Rather than having a certain deadline for scheduled newscasts to meet, reporters have to file stories as fast as they can. Producers, on the other hand, have to find more ways to keep news stories "fresh" to the viewers.

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