Backpack Journalism

Thanyarat Doksone

Through reading the two articles, I came to realize more about the significance of backpack journalism and the challenges it is facing in the ever-evolving media industry.

Multitasking and versatility are skills that cannot be achieved easily in a perfect manner. They, therefore, are among significant features required in journalists, particularly when the giant wave of multimedia convergence continues to wash ashore on the land of conventional media.

As Martha Stone cited in several survey results about proliferation of news-oriented Internet users, the demand for online news sphere keeps expanding and, in my point of view, so does that for backpack journalists. Nonetheless, the skyrocketing increase should not cut them some slack. I still believe the craft of journalism should be highly valued and pursued by reporters from all types of media.

Definitely, while Internet surfers expect to experience, like Jane Stevens said in her blog entry, context and continuity in multimedia; they also wish to observe the perfection in reports of different forms. This must add strenuous burdens to the stand-alone backpack journalists, but who dares to say it can be left out?

Five years after the two articles were published on the Internet, I am convinced that drastic improvements have been made to the world of convergence reporting, whether it is mounting financial resources or the cutting-edge technology used in reporting. This might be mainly because most backpack journalists, either novices or veterans, have proven that they did rule and they are here to stay … for a long time.