Kate’s Corner

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.

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