Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “news production and technology” describes the process and the tools that are necessary for formatting and disseminating journalistic content to an audience. Communication always needs a medium – be it air, paper, or electricity – to travel from producer to recipient, and the advance of technology has had a deep impact on forms of communication. Any kind of communication that goes beyond direct, local, interpersonal oral or visual interaction depends on a means of technology as a medium. The development of modern mass media, allowing journalists to reach dispersed, large audiences, is interrelated with technological innovations such as the invention of printing and electricity (→  Media History ). Thus, production of media content is largely dependent on and shaped by technology, which in itself can be seen as a necessary condition for journalism as a profession and its economic as well as social and political relevance (→  Communication Technology and Democracy ). The invention of movable type for book printing around 1450 by Johannes Gutenberg (1394?–1468) is usually seen as the advent of the age of modern mass communication – despite the fact that block printing and movable type had been used in Korea and China hundreds of years earlier (→  Printing, History of ). However, Gutenberg's invention laid the basis for the mass (re-)production of media content. The “Gutenberg ... log in or subscribe to read full text