“Everyone has the power to publish in their hands,” said John Nagy, director of online news operations for the News & Record, in an email interview. “Not everyone is cool with how to use that power.”

In the new culture of web, it is not only journalists who report the news; anyone with access to an Internet connection can be a reporter. This has led to changes, both positive and negative, for journalists and various newspaper organizations around the country.

“Journalism is going through a great change that I would call a convulsion largely because of the Internet and loss of advertising revenue, especially for newspapers,” said Washington Post Reporter Bob Woodward in an email interview.

Woodward refers to the downsizing that many newspapers have undergone due to changes in total profit and the nature of reporting.

“The cutbacks in newspapers have hurt the depth of reporting,” said Woodward. “When I headed the investigative unit at the Post in the 1980s and early 1990s we had as many as 18 people working on it. Now they have only 6.”

According to Suzanne Kirchhoff of the Congressional Research Service, the newsrooms of many daily papers lost 6,000 full-time workers in 2008. Between 2009 and 2010, another 7,400 jobs were cut from newsrooms across the country.

The decline of traditional print journalism has led to new forms of digital news coverage. Reporting is now covered by a wider variety of sources. Blog sites, social media networks and WikiLeaks have become popular ways for people to get their news. However, there is always the chance that the news provided by these sites is not true.

Nagy believes that while WikiLeaks provides an important service, there is a risk in “endangering the lives of specific individuals or groups by exposing certain information that may or may not be true.”

“Blogs are a refreshing addition in my opinion,” Woodward said. “But they are often not reliable, nor are they objective … there are exceptions and the deeply reported blogs will be the ones that survive. Most newspapers try to be objective, succeeding much of the time, and failing too often.”

Along with the blog sites that Woodward mentions, people have started turning to social media to get news updates. An example of this came when Twitter and Facebook became the dominant medium for news coverage on the riots in Libya.

“People are now empowered to speak, report, film and publish content that otherwise might not have a home in the ‘mass media,'” Nagy said. “(However,) just blabbing (information) out there without consequence is irresponsible.”

As newsrooms cutback and traditional journalism turns to new media, many journalists are wondering what the new journalism is going to look like.

“The website must be a different product than the newspaper,” said Nagy. “(Both) should present different content directed toward different needs and different readers.”