In Digitizing the News, Boczkowski attempts to look into the ventures of the News production systems that have been coping to integrate new media technologies into their tradational processes. In the age of the Web, he gives us three examples of what kind of combinations of conditions has led to the different forms of ventures: online news section, multimedia news and user-created news. In short his research focuses on the changes in the production side of the news, that those changes are fundamentally cultural rather than simply technological.
Interesting for sure, and valuable piece of history. However, it would have been better if the focus would have been more on providing actual evidences of changing interaction between news producers and users, and what kinds of impact it has on the quality, quantity and orientation of the news contents. For example, does user news production necessarily contribute for better journalism? user-friendly for sure, but other factors such as fact verification suffer. Archiving and browsing changes the time concepts of news reading pattern to a more flexible level, however the 24-hour-update system forces news readers and producers to hang on the new pieces of information all day. It is not the news production culture, but the culture of news in everyday life and society that changes.
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