Backpack Journalism is here to stay... for a while

In reading both of these articles, two things stuck out. The first was that this "backpack journalism" has been an inevitable step in the evolution of journalism since its conception. The second was that it is most certainly a step and not a conclusion. Journalism, throughout its history, has moved forward along its evolutionary track when the means of production became more and more readily available. When democracies were developed, the means of production of newspapers and mass media were given to the public, and were no longer owned by the government, which was one of the first evolutionary steps for journalism. At first only large companies were able to afford the machinery and systems involved in media production, but as the technology improved, smaller companies and more companies were able to access the means of production and the number of voices were increased. This was another evolutionary step in journalism. With the introduction of the Internet and further improvements in the technology of computers, cameras and other recording devices, yet another step was made with the empowerment of individuals to make their own news stories and spread it around the world. The backpack journalist is just another step in this process. The technology has improved to the point that one person can do the job of an entire team with less equipment and less money. Whether the quality is comparable is debatable, and it is debatable also whether audio/video quality should be such an issue in some journalism. All we can know for sure is that this is not the end; the time it takes to create a multimedia story will get shorter, its production costs will dwindle, and the number of people it can reach will grow. Now journalism must face the same issue every other industry faces: how to control dilution.