The Impact of Communications Technology on the Journalism Industry

New communications technologies have always impacted established industries for journalism and news. The introduction of the telegraph and telephone established a journalism framework where, for the first time, information could travel more quickly than humans. International news that would have been carried by horseback or ship previously was now able to be communicated the day they were written.

However, each successive advance in technology has generated new waves of inter-industry conflicts as old, established media industries attempt to repress newer technologies seizing the public market. This has been the case in the introduction of almost every new communications technology in recent years. Newspapers tried to repress the expansion of radio technology. Movie studios fought to prevent the spread of television. New technologies not only threaten to take away the audience of these established media industries, but they may threaten the existence of established industries as a whole.

In the case of broadcast radio versus newspapers, radios were more efficient at disseminating information at lower overhead to more people at speeds much faster than newspapers. As a result, newspapers tried to prevent the broadcast radio from gaining prominence in several ways. Gwyneth Jackaway writes in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television that:

The ‘attack’ of the press on radio took three forms: political lobbying, economic boycott and legal action. For a time, it worked. So effective were the attacks of the print journalists that only a few months after the networks began broadcasting their own news, they appealed to the press to meet with them and negotiate a ‘peace agreement’.

However, these attacks did not work. It became apparent shortly afterwards to J.R. Knowland of the Oakland Tribune that despite the newspaper industries’ attempts to suppress radio,

We cannot hope to sweep back the ocean with a broom . . . Radio is here to stay.

Though new technological advances in communication meet with backlash and criticism from established media because of the economic need to keep the status quo, they consistently supplant these established media because of their speediness and availability.