September, 2007
You are looking at posts that were written in the month of September in the year 2007.
Week 11: Blogging from Burma
Posted on September 30th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
The blogging world has received international attention this week for their part in spreading the news, photos and video footage of the chaos in Burma. Blogging has been lauded as a revolutionary tool. An interesting site to look at is Burmese Bloggers Without Borders.
In her article Burma Bloggers journalist Jane Holroyd writes that:
“Savvy young bloggers in Burma are breaking through the military junta’s tight internet controls to post photos and videos of swelling anti-government protests.”
“Many of these images have been picked up by mainstream news organisations because bloggers have managed to capture images that no one else can get.”
It is fantastic to see the internet and blogs being used as tools to spread the news about events taking place in a country that Reporters Without Borders describes as having one of the most restrictive media in the world for press freedoms.
I only hope the bloggers can continue to get around the military’s censorship of the internet to campaign for democracy to an international audience, who may also be motivated by the internet to stand up and help the Burmese people.
I also hope that those who have risked their lives by using the net to inform the rest of the world about the protests and the consequent military action remain safe and free from the persecution of the junta.
Week 10: The Future!
Posted on September 20th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Both the lecture and the weekly reading take an interesting look at what the newsroom and the industry of journalism might be like in the future.
I believe that there will be even more of a growth in the popularity of newer media forms, such as blogs, wikis and citizen journalism, as more people embrace the idea that they too can express their stories from their part of the world, share their knowledge and have their say in an international forum. The idea that people with specific knowledge would write blogs and columns is an excellent one as well, although it would take jobs away from journalists if the industry is going to become so condensed.
Just as the last few years have seen the meteoritic rise of before unknown technologies and applications (eg Podcasts, cameraphones, Facebook, Skype etc) I’m also sure that there are many more such things around the corner! What they are and how they will fit into the media environment I don’t know…
How we could fit more (new) forms of media into our lives though, I can not imagine, especially as I multitask my media use already…an average evening has the TV on, my laptop in front of me, my mobile next to me and the day’s papers spread out around me as I continually flit from one to the other…
As for the outlook for journalists, if there is going to be such a convergence in the media industry, a great convergence of skills will be required from everyone. This not only means there will be a much greater competition for jobs, as just being a good writer/researcher will no longer be enough, and only people with excellent skills across all areas of media production will be employed. As a student who is about to graduate, and who doesn’t have advanced skills in all those areas, this is a daunting prediction.
It also means that institutions, such as universities, will have to adapt their courses to not only teach that journalism is going to change, but to teach students the skills to cope with and excel in that change.
Week 9: Newsgear & Change
Posted on September 16th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
To be honest, I couldn’t make much sense of the reading for this week. It looks like a page out of a computer magazine and my eyes tend to glaze over at techie things like that. The photos of the videojournalist in the lecture outlines were a bit non-informative too. This is where recorded lectures for off-campus students would be very useful, so we could hear what was said about Richard Goncalves and his work.
There was an interesting blog on theage.com this week however, headlined “Journalism must adapt to change”, by Paul Chadwick, which discusses the need for media self-regulation and transparency.
One of his main points though was “the potential inherent in technological changes have made everyone with access to the internet and sufficient hardware and software a ‘publisher’ or ‘broadcaster’.”
This made me think of what we have learnt so far about citizen journalism and blogging and look at if from another perspective: that of the journalist who has been trained and has worked in the methods of “traditional journalism”. When we’ve been studying these concepts I have been excited that there is a way that I can partake in a form of journalism even though I am still only a student, but Chadwick looks at the other aspects of particapartory journalism: how it drives media companies to be continually self-examining.
This is a good thing in the case of transparency and ethics, but not always so, in the case of the resignation in March 2007 of Los Angeles Times opinion page editor Andres Martinez, as bloggers accused him of a conflict of interest and he was forced to resign by the paper.
Chadwick closes with the comment: “Journalism can only fulfil its proper role in a free society if it is agile and alert to change.” This also seems to be the main point that we as students are having drilled into us, and is also the driver behind the development of this unit, ALJ301, because journalism is changing, and that is a process that is happening now.
Week 8: Stomp & Innovations in Newspapers
Posted on September 3rd, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Stomp sounds like a very interesting news initiative, and quite different to other forms of UGC-based news. Particularly interesting was how people who sent in story ideas and information preferred to be interviewed and have the story written by reporters. I guess what I like about OhmyNews is that it offers me a means to practice my own writing and reporting, but understandably not everyone wants to write, but they still want to get their story out there.
Felix Soh oversees Stomp. He talks about how convergence has affected news presentation and about how we expect news to be constantly up-to-date. “We live in a multi-source world when it comes to getting information and news,” Soh said. “I get breaking news on my mobile phone. Mobile is big for breaking news.”
Like what Wright said about journalists (see last week’s post), Soh said all journalists employed on Stomp needed a fresh and creative outlook, to come up with innovative ideas for multimedia news.
Through Stomp, Soh wants newspapers to interact more with their audiences and help form communities, like Kathleen McCoy (see last week’s post), who discussed the importance of building a community when it comes to news. “How do we make them feel part of the paper? Through online social networking sites,” said Soh.
It seems fitting then that I was reading a wall posting on a friend’s Facebook profile, where her dad, an accountant for a Fairfax newspaper wrote: “Hi……find it all a bit confusing at the moment….but thought it was worth a look…..we are moving ahead big time at work with more enhanced digital services through the Fairfax group, so a good way to see how ‘your generation’ are using this sort of technology for social networking etc. cheers Dad.”
This just shows how using social networking sites to capture online communities which can then be channeled into news audiences and news-creating communities is happening as we speak!
Week 7: Writing for the web & bloggs.
Posted on September 2nd, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
To increase the quality and level of journalism and packaging of online news there is a need for journalists who can work across different media mediums, so they can create news content that “weave[s] together the text, sound, video, and images needed to create a modern multimedia story.” (Wright, B. 2005)
Wright closes by writing that it is up to the journalists and journalism students of today to learn the current tools of industry so they can go out and define the “style” of news writing for the web for tomorrow.
In his blog, buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis, the associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program for the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism, writes about examples of this happening.
In his posting My heroines, August 28th, 2007, Jarvis writes; “We hit kismet on so many fronts: the value of collaborative community journalism, the distributed architecture of news, the value of reporting vs. commodity news, the future of newsrooms and how to get them there, the growth of video from papers — and unlike me, she’s not just talking about it, she’s doing it. I love seeing people who are making progress bringing newspapers into the future.”
He then writes about Kathleen McCoy, assistant managing editor for interactivity at the paper in Anchorage, who has been working on building community news organizations.
On her blog she says “We work for the readers. So if they can contribute some of the content that binds a community - names, faces, achievements, good work - then the newspaper’s reporters can focus on their role, getting at the hard and complicated truth, facts people need to know.”
This highlights the ways in which citizen reporters and bloggers can be useful to the mainstream media outlets, and how they can incorporate what they have to say into news for public dissemination.
Both of these examples have shown me the value of citizen journalists and bloggers, as discussed in the reading, but also how important it is to be capable of using current technology and about the continued search to find the best style of news reporting that combines all of these technologies.