Although our generation is referred to as Generation Y, I think it’d be more fitting to call us “Generation One-Eye”. Admit it: Rolling over in bed to turn off our alarms in the morning enable our natural reflex to grab our phones; we check out what we’ve missed out on overnight – all with only one eye open. Now, I know I’m not the only one doing this. In fact, immediately after waking up is when I get all my top headlines. Thanks to my CNN app, friends on Facebook and all those overnight and overseas Tweeters, I get my news with the tap of a button on my smartphone in the comfort of my own bed.
That’s a giant leap not only in the way today’s generation wakes up, but also in the way we are informed. Why wait to reach the front door to get my newspaper (yes, I am part of a rare species which still have an actual paper subscription to The Washington Post) when I can very easily access any news I want when I want it, where I want it?
According to Time magazine, some states may even stop the production and selling of newspapers entirely due to the rise in wanting to fulfill our journalistic needs via the Internet. New platforms such as Twitter and cell phone apps which send you notifications to your phone immediately, have replaced traditional methods of journalism to a great extent. In fact, sites are being founded without a paper edition or television station, that are dedicated entirely to bringing us news for free.
Take The Huffington Post, for example, a political weblog founded in 2005 which, today, has quite an ambitious audience around the world and has become a staple in the revolution of online journalism. Having won Pulitzer Prizes and Webby Awards, The Huffington Post brags millions of views per article with an active group of users commenting, sharing and posting articles on their own Facebook walls or sending them off for friends and families to read.
Twitter is probably the most innovative and useful method for news reporting in today’s world. Known to some as the cause of the Arab Spring, Twitter has become a monumental part of the digital age of journalism. The website serves as a media and news platform for organizations which strive to report news as it happens all in a 140 character slot which is used to share headlines and links to news stories all around the world. By “hash-tagging” our way to getting the stories we want, Twitter users are able to narrow the field of news they wish to discover. This at-a-glance, tip-of-your-finger accessibility is exactly what a majority of today’s society members want in our fast-paced world: Getting the information when they want, where they want, and how they want it.
These newly found digital platforms have sped up delivery time and entirely changed the way we obtain the news. Videos, picture galleries and links embedded in articles give the reader an all-around experience when getting news online versus via hard copy. Although television news stations also contain both videos and galleries, digital journalism allows the viewer to go back to and recover the article at any time. Working to its advantage, the internet is always available as opposed to TV, which usually broadcasts stories fewer times throughout the day. Today, we are able to watch footage videos, view pictures and read captions, articles and other users’ comments to give us a full understanding.
So at the end of the day, regardless of whatever you’d like to refer to us as, Generation Y or Generation One-Eye, we are an up-to-date society which is able to experience journalism like never before. Probably the most up-to-date generation that has yet to exist, though we should expect to see more groundbreaking and convenient ways for us to “read all about it” online.