Answer: discuss the development and evolutionary history of news and communication media over the past 100 years and the characteristics of each media

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This article aims to trace the history of the evolution of the word convergence in journalism and communication, and to clarify its connotation and extension in different contexts, in order to correct the root cause, so as to provide a clearer understanding of the phenomenon of media convergence and the trend of development.

Convergence

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "convergence" first originated in the field of science, for example, in 1713, the British scientist William Derham talked about the convergences and divergences of the rays. of the rays.) Subsequently, the term was gradually applied to meteorology, mathematics, evolutionary biology, political science and economics.

The true marriage of the word convergence and mass communication began with the development of computers and the Internet in the mid-1970s. Farber and Baran published "the convergence of computing and telecommunication systems" in 1977; Nicolas Negroponte of MIT published "the convergence of computing and telecommunication systems" in 1974; and the University of Massachusetts Nicolas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1978 used a diagram to demonstrate the convergence of three intersecting rings that tend to overlap, representing the computer industry, the publishing and printing industry, and the broadcasting and movie industry. This famous illustration, the first demonstration of the visionary convergence of different industries, gained the favor of business leaders, and Negroponte received millions of dollars in sponsorship, which enabled him to found what would become the renowned Media Lab in 1985.

Subsequently, more and more thinkers in the world of journalism and communications began to realize the impact of technological developments on the news media. For example, William Paley, chairman of CBS, gave a speech at the 1980 annual broadcasting conference focusing on the new challenges posed by the convergence of delivery mechanisms for news and information (Gordon, 2003). challenges to the industry (Gordon, 2003).

It is difficult to say who first used the term convergence in the context of communication technology, but communication scholar Ithiel De Sola Pool is credited with popularizing the term (Gordon, 2003). In his 1983 book The Technologies of Freedom, Pool proposed the convergence of modes, arguing that the development of digital electronics was the cause of the historically distinctive convergence of modes. He argued that the development of digital technology was the cause of the convergence of modes.

In 1994, when The New York Times reported that the San Jose Mercury News and AOL*** had launched a newsletter service called Mercury Center News, it used a subheading: "A Media Convergence" (A Media Convergence). "(A Media Convergence) (Gordon, 2003).

In the early 1990s, communications, consumer electronics, media, and computers could still exist as separate industries providing different services through different modes of communication, but digital convergence, which has developed with computer digital technology, has not only changed the time, space, and its cost of access to information by the mass media, but, more importantly, it has provided the telecommunication, publishing, and radio and television industries with the More importantly, it has provided important technical support for the emergence of industrial convergence in telecommunications, publishing, and radio and television. In this regard, Greenstein and Khanna define convergence as "the blurring or disappearance of industrial boundaries in order to accommodate industrial growth" (Cao Wei, Hao Yalin, 2004). By the time the historic merger of America Online and Time Warner was announced in the early 2000s, the word convergence had already become a common term in electronic information dissemination (Gordon, 2003).

Different Meanings of Convergence in Journalism and Communication

However, this increasingly popular term has a variety of meanings even in the field of journalism and communication, and it is these different meanings that have led to ambiguity about the term. With this in mind, Rich Gordon categorizes the meaning of the term in different communication contexts as follows:

Convergence in Media Technology

While the era of complete technological convergence has not yet arrived, the concept of convergence of communication forms put forward by Poole gives us a glimpse of the future development of media technology. Cell phones now have the ability to videotape, record, watch television programs, send and receive e-mail, and so on. It can be said that the convergence of media technology is the basis for all the ensuing convergence in the field of news and communication.

Media ownership merger (Convergence of Ownership)

The highest level of convergence of today's media conglomerates refers to the concentration of media ownership, with the merger of the parent companies of Viacom (Viacom), Disney (Disney), Vivendi Universal, and America Online Time Warner (AOL Time Warner ) is often cited as a prime example of media ownership consolidation in today's global economic environment. When AOL and Time Warner merged their ownership in 2000, the Financial Times of London commented that the merger made clear for the first time that the long-awaited convergence of the various modes of programming and its distribution was becoming a reality (Gordon, 2003).

However, the media ownership merger raised concerns among many media critics. Ben Bagdikian, a journalist and academic, predicted in the first edition of his 1983 book The Media Monopoly that a few media corporations would control what the vast majority of ordinary Americans read, hear, and see. He feared that this concentration of ownership and control of content would silence diverse voices in society, resulting in a failure of news communication to portray social reality fully and accurately.

In the United States, long before the convergence of technology, concerns about the concentration of media ownership led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to pass the Radio/TV Cross-Ownership Restriction in 1970 and the Radio/TV Cross-Ownership Restriction in 1975. Restriction) in 1970 and the Newspaper/Broadcast Cross-Ownership Prohibition in 1975, which disallowed a media company from owning both broadcast media and newspapers in the same city, and placed restrictions on the scope of simultaneous ownership of broadcast media. restrictions.

But the interest and trend toward consolidation of media ownership has continued unabated over time. As Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Co. publishing group, said, "We're going to have to do something about it," he said. Jack Fuller, president of Tribune Co. Publishing Group, says that owning television, radio and newspapers in the same market reduces costs, enhances efficiency and provides better quality news (Gordon, 2003). Due to the development of information and communication technology, especially new communication methods such as network communication, the past restrictions on media ownership are outdated and cannot adapt to the reality of the current media market.

In view of this, the United States amended and passed a new telecommunications law in 1996, lifting the restrictions on inter-industry operations in the communications industry, and opening up competition to allow communications companies to inter-industry operations of other types of communications media, in order to cope with the new communications environment brought about by new technologies. Through acquisitions and mergers, media companies have integrated their property rights, operations and products to form large-scale multimedia conglomerates and engage in multimedia business with economies of scale. In this way, newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, movies and Internet sites can break the boundaries of each other's production operations for interactive integration, and thus achieve resource **** enjoyment and the derivation of different forms of information products, and then promote each other, promotions, momentum, through different platforms to the audience, so as to achieve twice the result with half the effort of the economic benefits.

Convergence of Media Tactics

Convergence of Media Tactics does not require a merger of media ownership, but usually refers to the full cooperation in content and marketing between media such as TV, newspapers, movies, and the Internet under different ownership systems. Media Symbiosis has taught that media can only ***be*** prosperous if they depend on each other. This dependence is the same as the relationship between movies and television, records and radio.

Tactical media partnerships are initially designed to market their respective media products. Newspaper and television partners, for example, believe that cross-selling drives newspaper readers to watch television and television viewers to read newspapers; that television viewers can find out about the news stories in tomorrow's paper, while newspaper readers get the latest weather forecasts from television stations in the weather section; and that newspaper journalists can get television reporters to provide more detailed information on live newscasts. The newspaper reporter allows the TV reporter to provide more detailed and in-depth information during the live newscast; the TV reporter carries a camera, while the newspaper photographer carries a digital camcorder. If the newspaper wants a photo and the TV station wants a 20-second video of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, there's no need to send two photographers.

Structural Convergence of Media Organization

With the convergence of media technologies and the consolidation of media ownership, the job responsibilities of media professionals and the structure of media organizations change. For example, when the Orlando Sentinel partnered with Time Warner Cable to launch a 24-hour local news channel, they assembled a team of multimedia editors, most of whom had broadcasting backgrounds, who coordinated between the two newsrooms, communicated with copywriters, and transformed newspaper content into television news. This is a structural convergence of media organizations in response to need.

The one company that has really taken the concept of organizational integration to its logical conclusion is Media General in Tampa, Florida. The group has its newspapers (Tampa Tribune), television stations (WFLA-TV) and Internet sites (Tampa Bay Online) all in the same building, under one roof, in one newsroom, with interviewers from all media working together, coordinating and collaborating on stories, and even with the same reporter covering newspaper and television stories as well as electronic news. The same information is packaged into products suitable for different media through different forms, expanding the market, saving costs, and obtaining greater benefits (Lin Renjun, 2003).

Convergence of Information Gathering

When journalists talk about media convergence, the focus is always on whether each journalist will be required to use different interviewing tools for news reporting in the future. For example, will newspaper reporters be lugging around bulky cameras and recording equipment? To that end, engineers at Columbia University have developed a mobile workstation that can be carried so that journalists can capture multiple forms of content (Gordon, 2003).

The concept of the backpack journalist first appeared on the Online Journalism Review website in 2002 to great reaction. Jane Ellen Stevens proudly proclaims herself a backpack journalist. She is a reporter for a newspaper and a photojournalist for television stations and websites. "Can you imagine hiring a reporter who is not computer literate now? Ten years from now, you likewise can't imagine hiring a reporter who can't work across media." And Preston Mendenhall of MSNBC's Web site is the poster child for the backpack reporter, who traveled across Afghanistan for half a month and sent back a huge amount of copy, stills, and audio and video recordings that were broadcast on radio and Web sites (Gordon, 2003).

Convergence of News Storytelling

The emergence of the Internet has made the convergence of news storytelling possible. Multimedia news dissemination form is the fusion of text, photos, sound, video, animation and charts and other forms of news narrative. The Online Interactive Special Report of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida has produced a series of excellent in-depth multimedia reports, including a story about a black street in St. Petersburg that combines newspaper text, radio sound, television images and interactive graphics. One story on a black street in St. Petersburg combined newspaper text, radio sound, TV graphics and interactive charts to create an all-encompassing experience for the senses.

Compared with single-media reporting in the past, the multimedia news produced by the integration of news narrative forms has the following characteristics:

1. Large capacity: the capacity of information technology-based network multimedia news is almost unlimited, no longer subject to the traditional news layout and time constraints, and the cost of storage is getting lower and lower.

2. Real-time: multimedia news can be updated at any time, anywhere, to meet the increasing demand for news timeliness.

3. Interactivity: Unlike the one-way transmission of traditional media, multimedia news is a two-way transmission of information, the user can receive information, but also feedback information, and decide to browse the content, order and time.

4. Multi-terminal: Multimedia news terminal can be a computer, cell phone, can be a TV, and even can be portable e-books.

The Chinese translation of Convergence

The word Convergence in the field of news dissemination in the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan is usually said to have four translations: convergence, fusion, convergence, integration. According to the Modern Chinese Dictionary and some other Chinese dictionaries, Convergence mainly refers to the meeting of water or people; Aggregation has two meanings: (1) gathering together; (2) Chemically, it refers to the method of combining monomers to form a polymer composite; Fusion refers to the synthesizing of several different things into a single one; Integration is the assembling of different opinions or things to be re-united and become a new whole. Therefore, I personally believe that media convergence and media integration more closely reflect the original meaning of the word convergence. Of course, the best way to translate the word convergence is to translate it into merger (e.g., Convergence of Ownership), union (e.g., Convergence of Media Tactics), fusion or integration (e.g., Convergence in Media Technology), or integration (e.g., Convergence in Media Technology), according to the meaning of the word convergence in different contexts. Convergence in Media Technology).

Impact of Convergence on the Journalism Industry and Academia

Media convergence is the most important development phenomenon of the journalism and communication industry in the last century. The multimedia communication functions of the Internet, such as text, sound, and images, have greatly changed the operation of communication organizations, allowing the media to collect, distribute, and share information through multiple platforms. The merging of media and the development of media technology have promoted the emergence of convergence journalism. Carrie Anna Criado and Camille Kraeplin of Southern Methodist University in Texas, USA, conducted the first comprehensive study of the nation's journalism and communication industry and the degree of media convergence in journalism institutions over a one-year period beginning in 2002.

1. media organizations and journalism educators generally agree that media convergence is important to the future of journalism and communication;

2. the vast majority of newspapers and television stations they surveyed have engaged in tactical media alliances, sharing news and human resources with one another;

3. University journalism programs are also moving towards convergence, as training in convergent journalism skills has become important and necessary, and cross-platform communications training has been or will soon be incorporated into curriculum planning.

Previously, journalists usually learned communication skills in one medium and then made their chosen field a lifelong career. However, in the 21st century, journalists should recognize the trend of media convergence and strive to strengthen their cross-media communication skills to become convergence journalists who are capable of writing and communicating in multiple formats.