Technology vs. Tradition

One of the debates going on in sports media today, especially in terms of teaching it at Journalism and Mass Comm schools, is how much emphasis do we put on technology? The developments are so amazing that everything we understand about media technology is virtually being rewritten before our eyes.

There are some who insist that convergence is the future of the industry and if we don't get on board we'll be left behind. But the danger of emphasizing the technology is that it changes so fast we hardly have time to understand it before it becomes obsolete. The other problem is emphasizing the technology at the expense of good journalistic standards like writing, reporting and editing. Just because someone is technologically savvy enough to create a blog (like this one!) or a citizen-journalism driven news program like Rocketboom (even with its millions of hits) doesn't make it good reporting.

I failed to mention that what got me started on all this was Michael Hiestand's article on how NBC will now stream on the Internet every second of every event of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I'm not sure, but that might be one of the signs of the Apocalypse.