JOURNALISM AND NEWS INDUSTRY IN MALAYSIA: NEW MEDIA, NEW CHALLENGES

Abstract

The development of advanced communication technologies emerged from the fourth industrial revolution has forced print media such as newspapers to evolve and adapt in the new digital media environment. The rise of online journalism for example, has radically impacted journalism profession in Malaysia particularly on how news is made. A fully digitized news content is the new frontier for 21st century journalism. The news industry landscape in Malaysia and other countries too have undergone similar significant changes and serious challenges as the news industry making the big leap into the age of digitization. Evidently, digital media, internet new media and so forth is here to stay. The adoption of the Internet by news organizations offers a new platform for reaching strategic mass audiences. The decentralization of media has enable audience to become highly selective when it comes to read any news. and to understand this has become a critical part in newsgathering and news-processing routines. The new media environment that characterized by its interactivity and flexibility provide the digital sanctuary for partisan bloggers and citizen reporters to thrive and creat their own version of news. Such phenomena presents a set of issues and opportunities that extend beyond traditional boundaries that is familiar to most journalists. As the Internet offers bigger storage, faster and expand in unpredictable directions, it raises an array of new questions about practices and values, some of which go to the declared defining essentials of journalism. With more and more people consuming news digitally, the future of journalism is constantly changing and journalists of the future will face a number of challenges. The results elaborate some of the tensions between traditional journalism, rooted in old media, and the new perceptions, expectations and pressures of digital journalism in an increasingly interconnected media system.