ABSTRACT
All of us now live in a world of media on demand. We receive the news we want, how and when we want it, in whatever degree of depth we prefer, on the devices of our choice. In the days of traditional mass media, when there were few ways to learn about news, information was published and broadcast with the idea that the audiences who needed it would seek it out. Households subscribed to daily newspapers. Commuters listened to drive-time FM radio in their cars on their way to and from work. Families tuned in to six o’clock and eleven o’clock local news broadcasts. With the advent of a public Internet, new mobile technology, and to some degree years earlier, the non-legacy news outlets created in the early days of cable TV (specifically CNN, and later, CNN’s Headline News, which introduced the twenty-four-hour news cycle), viewers were liberated from the fixed time slots and delivery methods of the old mass media model. Although in the pre-Internet days of the early 1980s, the kind of multimedia journalism we think of today was not possible, CNN’s cable news experiment was among the first to change the viewer’s relationship to the media. More significant changes evolved slowly with the development of cable and satellite television, and the proliferation of channels throughout the 1980s.
