The Status and Issues of Social Informatization in Japan and Korea ; The Future of Journalism in Cyberspace

Since about 1995, online journalism, cyber journalism, and new media journalism have become trendy terms in computer magazines and real scenes of mass media. In this, we can observe two genealogies for the challenge of publishing journalism in the Internet. First, there has been a grass roots oriented phenomenon of emerging information editorships in the Internet by ordinary citizens. The past few years have seen the appearance of numerous activities to make public spheres that transcend private chats and can be shared by expanding numbers of persons. Some of them have evolved from the myriad of interactions by e-mail, mailing lists, and home pages of the World Wide Web (WWW). It means that editorships capable of networking untold amount of information like stars, in the galaxy, have emerged simultaneously at many places on our planet. A raft of social groups, such as hobby circles, citizen movements, tiny magazines, academic associations and institutions, and volunteer groups, are now demonstrating their editorial functions. Accordingly, these editorships have become new forms of journalism in the Internet. Second, we find the advancement of informatization in mass media firms. For example, since the 1970s, newspapers, as printed form of media, have introduced electronic information technology to their production repertoire for the purpose of industrial development and streamlining management. It began with computerized typesetting (CTS), then progressed to the editorial aspect. In the late 1980s, reporters started writing their reports by word processors, sending them via computer network and generally all the sectors in newspaper production was computerized except for sales and distribution. The Asahi Shimbun, one of leading newspaper in Japan, called this period the "General information industrialization of newspapers." And to cap it, the Internet has emerged as a major tool of information distribution