Jim Stefan on Digital Journalism

Jim Stefan is known to many in New South Wales as the premier entertainment and event manager in New South Wales. What many people do not realize is that Jim Stefan got his start in journalism. In fact, for much of the 1990s, Jim Stefan was the publisher and owner of the Sydney Tribune as well as the Sydney Journal Magazine.  Additionally, during that time, Jim Stefan was a member of the Journalists Association of Australia.

Throughout his time in the industry, Jim Stefan has watched the face of journalism change extensively. In fact, Jim Stefan says that journalism and the way it conducts its business have changed entirely. When Jim Stefan first joined the journalistic profession, consumers received their news in two ways: the morning paper and the nightly local television news broadcast. In the 1990s, the internet was a brand new thing and journalists were still wondering how this new technology would affect their profession, for better or for worse.

Newspaper owners and publishers like Jim Stefan had to figure out how to best produce their content on the new information super high way. As time went on, it became clear to publishers like Jim Stefan that journalism, as they had known it, was changing forever. One of the biggest changes that Jim Stefan noticed was the time frame in which news changed. In the era of print and television journalism, a big story would play out over the course of days, weeks or months. Now, with the advent of cable news networks and the use of the internet as a news outlet, a story plays out completely in hours or minutes. In fact, with the increasingly ubiquitous use of Twitter, news reporters can now convey hundreds of stories a day, all in one hundred forty characters or less. Jim Stefan believes that digital journalism is a wonderful thing.