TED Talks

After viewing this video on social media and its impact on the receiving and sending of information, I was quite pleased to have heard a new take on this argument. It was overwhelmingly positive, but it was also realisitic about what people will have to deal with and why it is beneficial.

I was first introduced to the TED talks a year or two ago. Some of my favorite authors and pundits have been featured on here including Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and a few others. The TED talks are excellent because they are informative but they are also professional and entertaining. The "thinking man's youtube" is definitely a good way to describe it.

Back to the talk that I just watched. As I started this video, I realized that it was almost 20 minutes long. I was a bit hesitant at first to sit and watch the whole thing right now, but once I started it, I found myself 15 minutes in without even realizing that I was watching this for an assignment. As the presenter stated, social media, although it has taken its beating from many directions, has been important in many ways. In a book that I picked up recently, Losing the News by Alex Jones, he is very pessimistic about the transforming of newspapers to a digital format, and wants back his old print news that was a "defender of democracy." As we just witnessed in this talk, this is anything but true. The example of the use of Twitter by Chinese citizens to do serious citizen journalism shows that digital and social media are more effective than ever at spreading information. While I guess you cannot call China a democracy, it is becoming more and more liberated by the day and social media seems to have an important role in that.

Yes, there are downfalls to social media when looking at it from a journalistic perspective, but if it can get information out that quickly and effectively, we at least know that it is serving a good purpose in one sense or another. I would also like to point out something that occurred to me while watching this video. Because so many people will tweet about an event as it is happening, it seems logical that false accounts will be filtered out. If there is one overwhelming take on it that many citizens are reporting, it seems likely that it will be pretty close to the truth. This is similar to the idea of Wikipedia. While many people discredit it as being an unreliable source, it is quite effective in putting out true and interesting information. This is because the minute somebody posts something false on a page, it will immediately get deleted and filtered out because there are enough users to keep others in check. This is kind of like Adam Smith's invisible hand in economics, applied to social media.

PressThink Blog

After reviewing the PressThink blog that was posted for us to review, I had some thoughts that I will share. On initial viewing of the homepage, I liked the sidebar information that said, "we need to keep the press from being absorbed into the media." This is the idea that I plan on directing my project for this class on. That is, whether or not the press is becoming too much like social networking sites and blogs that are not accountable for false information that is spread. While I plan on looking more at the effects of the transition to digital media, this blog seemed to be a general take on why classic journalism is important and why we need to keep it from slipping into becoming too much like entertainment.

For the most part, this blog took on the form of any basic journalism site; it has resources for journalists, how to apply for the NYU journalism school, etc. I did notice that it has not been updated in awhile. The latest post is from April of this year. Regardless of that though, I enjoyed sifting through it because it has a similar form of what I want my blog to have. It analyzes journalism and its current state in our society. I also liked the article "If Bloggers had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue." This is a particularly strong area of interest for me, whether or not bloggers are held to the same ethical standards that journalists are. In all, I enjoyed this site and liked seeing how a professional journalists has analyzed and informed the public on the field of journalism.

Analyzing Digital Journalism

I have still been thinking about how to direct myself in this class, and I think I have come up with a decent idea. Because this class deals with multimedia writing, I think that my topic of choice should be directly related to that. I have already said that my interests lie in journalism, and I have written about how the transition from print to online is affecting the industry, so I think I can take this idea and run with it.

My proposed idea is that I will start a separate blog or website of some sort that will analyze the reporting of politics and news from blogs, twitters and news sites. I will see how many people cite sources on their blogs, how much information is false or biased in a sense that is clearly intrudes on the quality of reporting, etc. I will be looking at the transition to digital media and if its effects are degrading to journalism. This is a very broad task to take on, but I think research and regular updates can help make it coherent enough. This ironic part of all of this is that I am taking a critical eye at digital media, but I am doing it in a form of the exact thing that I am criticizing. Am I part of the problem? Not necessarily. I think that if I still uphold journalistic values of citing sources, reporting true information and not being guilty of libel, I can make this a worthwhile project that will come to form quite nicely.

I want this to read from the first person, but not necessarily opinion based. I will state why I am doing it and I will call out sites that I think are giving out false information, but I will back it up with logic and reasoning. So it will be an opinion in a sense, but I would like it to be more newsy than editorial.

Does this sound like a worthwhile idea? Let me know your thoughts.

Pondering...

Over the past week or so, I have been pondering how I would like to direct myself in this course, and how I can make it beneficial for me. While I like the idea of creating an online resume/website with my work, I feel that it is more important as of right now to create something with substance that I can then later on put on a personal online resume. So my question then is, what do I do now?

My interests lie in journalism, specifically concentating on politics/history. This is generally where I want to go with my career, but how would I apply this to a multimedia writing class? I have been pondering a few ideas, but nothing has jumped out at me yet. The journalism and political world are both major periods of flux and they seem to be inter-related. Because journalism is presented more and more in an online format and political news is reported via journalists, one directly affects the other. So where do I go from here? Anyone have any ideas?

The Beginning

As a student of journalism, I am currently analyzing the field and how I am going to fit into it. I enjoy the classic view of the newspaper man who rushes around to follow leads and expose scandals, but the words "newspaper man" are seldom paired together anymore. The idea of what journalism was is now undergoing a massive overhaul and the industry may never look the same again. Because I am only in my early twenties, I have not been around long enough to have a life long attachment to having my fingers inked up after cracking open the morning paper. This is what many are trying to hold on to, but it is slipping away at a faster rate than ever. Personally, I like to embrace the change that is happening, and I think that it will better our ability to give the news to the people. Breaking news stories do not have to wait a day or more to be published; they can now be put up instantaneously on a news site for all of the world to see. While there are many downsides to this transition as well, it is something I am going to have to deal with if this is what I want to do with my life, which brings me to the purpose of this class.

If I am going to keep up as a journalist in a multimedia environment, I will now need an entire artillery of weapons to look attractive to serious news outlets. I see English 417 as a way to embrace what I am going to be facing post-graduation. I want to learn how to set up a website, write in a way that will attract readers while still maintaining credibility, understand how the design of a news page will change from print to online, and many other areas. I am coming at this class from a journalistic standpoint. While I have taken classes in tech writing and it is a part of my major, journalism is where my passion is and that is where I would like to concentrate my efforts. I am looking for this class to further my understanding of the digital revolution and how I am going to be a part of it.