I stumbled upon (well, not literally) this MAJ thesis about the impact of technology on journalism as a profession.
It’s something I’ve often thought about, not least because I vividly remember making my own ‘newspapers’ when I was a kid with a typewriter and lots of pritt stick. The paper is interesting in that it illustrates just how recently professional papers were produced in a not too dissimilar fashion. There’s a chapter of case studies which is definitely worth a read if it’s a topic you’re even vaguely interested in.
What I enjoyed most about it is the analysis/commentary on the real impact of technology - the fact that on the one hand, things should happen quicker and editors should have more time, but as it turns out deadlines hit reporters earlier, and somehow, in some ways, things got a bit crazier instead. It’s also interesting to see that sub-editors were seemingly so distracted by the new technology that for a while they forgot what they were there for in the first place and the journalism itself seemed to slip a notch.
I may need to go hunting for a more recent analysis of the same kind of thing - this one was written in 1996 when it was all in many ways just getting started, but I would imagine both perspectives and practices have changed significantly since then.
