Kate’s Corner

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.

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