Technology, are you a twit wit?

The UK site Journalism.co.uk is a great resource for journalists and citizen journalists alike. It contains both blogging advice and publishing advice that is easy to understand. Over 140,000 hits each month make it one of the most popularly monitored blogs focused on the journalism industry. Journalism.co.uk is published by Mousetrap Media Ltd, an independent online publishing company. Being an independent online company Journalism.co.uk has the advantage of remaining unbiased when it comes to commenting on other media companies and news stories. The site has a large variety of media related stories ranging from addressing issues of politics within companies to examining journalists rights to detailing individual journalists stories within the blogsphere.

Journalism.co.uk is a great resource for pretty  much any journalism related subject. They also offer a list of the best Journalism blogs (or J-blogs as they call them).  As i mentioned earlier certain domains can easily be identified as more legitimate than others, so always check the  address to weed out any faux-professional pages.

Jim from the Office says never click on a dodgey URL.

During this semester i have learned a great deal about all aspects of the technologically advancing field of journalism. As a future journalist student myself, i cannot help but be encouraged and excited about the developments that have occurred over the last decade. I personally don’t believe internet, broadband and print journalism need to have a battle royale with the winner dominating the other, I think convergence is the key to success for all media outlets. People, like myself, that enjoy both reading online and in print will still do so, no matter what type of gadget the technology companies think up next.

In the end the news is only enhance, not degraded, by the new wave of journalists attempting to make the news more accessible to a global audience.

Finally, as it is nearly Halloween, I’d like to leave you with the last of these awesome ‘plain English’ youtube videos.

Just in case any Dawn of The Dead scenarios occur!

Hope you’ve enjoined reading this blog as much as I’ve enjoined posting it!

Innovation, its something that drives industry, without originality, creativity and initiative nothing would ever get done in the world.

What’s Next: Innovation In Newspapers is a blog dedicated to the advances newspapers make. It keeps a detailed record of the alterations newspapers make in attempts to keep their companies up to date. For example here the blog praises TIME magazine for its February 2009 cover of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama during the election race. The comment below reads, ‘A great cover story. With the right questions! Brilliant!’

The blog is not only concerned with the news aspect of journalism but all areas of the industry. On January the 5th Innovation commented on the New York Times advertisement design.

“Today’s edition has this great CBS ad.

An excellent ad design.

The ad is two-and-a-half inches high, and lies horizontally across the bottom of the front page, below the news articles and a brief summary of some articles in the paper.

In the past, The New York Times has printed an occasional and very expensive front-page classified ad — two or three lines of text at the bottom of the page.”

New York Times Page

Another post comments on Rupert Murdoch’s interview on June the 9th where he notes that digital news is the way all journalism is headed, the website claims that it has been saying the same thing since 2008.

“Let’s not wait 10 years. Let’s change right now. We have the brands.The credibility. All the digital tools. Journalism’s soul. What we need is leadership at the top. Vision. Strategy. And quick implementation.”

This weeks blog is based on a transcript of the Sydney forum on the future of mass quality journalism, broadcast 11 April 2009.

Journalism appears to be at a cross roads, and if you believe the panic, it all has to do with the emergence of the internet. The internet has forced journalism (print journalism specifically) to reevaluate how it sells itself to its readers.

All i can say is that i am glad i didn’t have to attend this forum. The future of journalism could be talked about for days and we still wouldn’t know the answer. Print, broadcast and online mediums all bring a unique aspect to journalism as a whole but ultimately we need real journalist, professional journalist, behind these ventures for them to be not only ethical but also reputable.

Nineteen pages of debating about the future of journalism? Let me sum it up for you. People who still think that print journalism is the only viable form of news are stuck in this time period…

…and will most likely die out like the dinosaurs did.

While technological savvy journalist make leaps and bounds in the field…

… and understand that all mediums need to work together in order to survive.

Mobile Journalism, or Mojo as its commonly referred to, has taken the journalism world by storm.

Not only is Mojo quick, inexpensive and easily accessible it also allows for more intimate interviews and footage. As seen in the above video, Mojo Steve Garfield was able to catch a highly sought after politician off guard and due to this scored an exclusive grab. Cameras, lights and microphones will often cause talent to freeze up and refuse to even be interviewed, mobile cameras however seem to be less intimidating than a three person crew.

As this weeks reading (DSO pdf file: Week Nine written by Stephen Quinn) points out, technology is improving faster than we know what to do with it. Established mojos may be ahead of the curve with their fast-paced live reporting.

In July 2009 Morgan Stanley Research described the migration to Internet-connected mobile devices as “one of the biggest opportunities in the history of the technology industry.” Smart phones literally combine the three most used technologies in the world, the internet, the television and the telephone.

Here is a video of the various locations in my town Bacchus Marsh that I’ve taken on my mobile and then uploaded to youtube.

Stomp (Straits Times online mobile and print) is a Singapore online news source. It’s user-generated content is viewed by over 300,000 people within the country. As opposed to its more professional and hard-hitting print counterpart The Strait Times, Stomp is more focused on local issues and consumer complaints.

As deputy editor Felix Soh notes, “It is not serious journalism in the form that The Straits Times offers, though Stomp does deal with journalism that affects people’s lives.” In this sense Stomp is directly affecting the lives of its readers, and as this weeks reading suggest, improving them.

‘On 10 November 2006 John Spencer Tan sent Stomp photographs of dangerous stairs on the second level of a double-decker bus. The anti-slip band on a step had dislodged, and a middle-aged woman had tripped and fallen. Two days after Tan’s photograph appeared, the step was fixed. Tan said he felt encouraged to know citizens could improve the situation around them.’

(Strait Times online, multimedia and print, Stephen Quinn)

The news outfit gets the scoop via SMS or email and then re-interviews and follows up on each story. The convergence of video, audio, print and internet technology has reinvigorated, not just the Singaporean, but globally the world media.

Not only does it have the new Stomp version of news, Strait Times has also launched the online video channel Razor TV.

Vanity Fair Cover for April 2009

This weeks blog post focuses on the article Media Darwinisms : Which Sites Will Survive? by Matt Pressman for the famous American magazine, Vanity Fair. The article notes that online news agencies, like the NY Times and WashingtonPost.com, are on the out and more gossip focused celebrity news sites like Perez Hilton or Just Jared are on the rise. Dpes this reflect a change in society focus? Or is it just easier to mass produce unsolicate gossip than to research and support hard hitting journalist pieces?

The fact is that the internet is an easy to access and easy to publish news source for posters and audiences alike. This can have both positive and negative consequences on the quality and reliability of news and information.

Twitter, for example, comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Anyone can create a twitter, anyone can post anything they want (as long as it is kept to 140 characters long). Another enormous disadvantage that plagued Twitter was that many ‘twi-posters’ create fake accounts impersonating celebrities and politicians. These ‘twit wits’ would post false information and in some cases this information was then taken and reported by celebrity websites like that of Perez or Just Jared.  Twitter however has tried to rectify this problem, they now offer a ‘verified account‘ feature for more famous users which promises to confirm the person using the account is in fact who they say they are.

Deciphering which kind of blogs are legitimate and which kind are set up specifically by marketing companies is something consumers have only recently started to do.  Many products, from movies to shoes to degergents, have some form of online marketing associated with them.

A prime example is that of the viral marketing campaign that was launched a few weeks before the movie, District 9, was released. A website was set up by the marketers of the movie to attract attention to the release and it worked extremely well. D-9.com is a website based entirely on the plot of the film and presents itself as a virtual reality in which everything in the film is real and before you even enter the site, humans are asked to ‘report non-humans’. User submissions from fans of the show  detailing how the ‘aliens’ came to earth are labeled as ‘sitings’. The site is extremely convincing, and this kind of detailed marketing will not be the last of its kind.

As this week’s reading points out, most domains that end in government data (.gov/.govt), military (.mil/.mod) or university material (.edu/.ac) addresses are the most trust worthy.
Special interest groups (.org & .net) and business and private (.com/.co) domains are considered to be less reliable as they are not necessarily associated with a specific legal or ethical code.

Gyeongbok Palace is the largest of the Five Grand Palaces in South Korea.

South Korea has the world’s highest number of broadband connections per capita. The number of internet consumers is staggering. Eighty-five percent of households in the country have a broadband connection. Whenever a capital has a high, concentrated, percentage of people the intensity of consumer based sales is magnified. With the case of broadband internet the quality, as well as availability, has increased ten fold(South Korea lead in broadband quality).This has now allowed for citizen journalism to become professional journalism.

OhmyNews is a prime example of citizen journalism becoming commercial. The famous website, created by Korean Journalist Oh Yeon-oh in 2000, publishes award winning stories that have come directly from citizens. It created an outlet for everyday people to report on events without university degrees or credentials (OhmyNews Gave Me A Platform). TIME magazine ran an article on one of the OhmyNews citizens reporters Kim Hye Won and called OhmyNews a ‘revolution’ for the media market (definately worth the look: read the full article HERE). Oh Yeon-oh and OhmyNews has helped citizen journalism become a mainstream recognized form of journalism. Not only has OhmyNews created waves within the industry it has also done something many other online news ventures have failed to do, turn a (albeit marginal) profit.

The exact reason for the success of OhmyNews is hard to pin point. One could argue the market was always in need of such a ‘revolutionary’ venture and Mr Oh Yeon-oh simply provided a service that was inevitably going to be created someday. However, you cannot deny the originality, maintenance and effort that it takes to keep OhmyNews, not only running but also reputable, is beyond anything any other media mogul has ever displayed.

This weeks blog is based upon an online article in Wired Magazine, Free! Why $o.oo Is the Future of Business. Wired is an online journal that focuses specifically on news about technology. The article featured addresses the issue of ‘freeconomics’.

The practice of giving something away in exchange for long-term sales benefits was introduced by Michael Gillet, the inventor of the famous men’s razor of the same name. The most common example is that of mobile phone carriers. In Australia companies like Vodafone, Telstra and Optus regularly ‘give away’ ‘free’ phones when consumers sign onto long-term contracts.

The internet, via online advertising, has become the most productive business model available. Advertising online has become an enormous revenue generator for many Australian and international companies.

Wired explains this perfectly, “in the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers; they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.”

Therefore when we surf online we are not charged to visit certain sites but it does not mean that our visit has been free. Advertisers understand that to reach the modern audiences they need to advertise on a medium that the modern audiences attracts.

Nothing is free

“Blogs represent a major development in media consumption and practice.”
‘User-generated content and the changing news cycle.’
Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan

This week’s blog will be based upon my reactions to the reading, User-generated content and the changing news cycle by Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan. In summary the reading referred to the phenomenon of new technology journalism (video, online, mobile) vs. old technology journalism (TV, print radio). In many areas of the media new technology has not only enhanced but also challenged the way journalist bring audiences the news. Various news outfits, like the ones mentioned in the reading (NYTimes, The Guardian) have evolved their media outlets to include online, mobile and podcasting platforms. News companies have discovered that instead of attempting to fight smaller new media bloggers by trying to make print or broadcast news the only source of news, they should themselves adapt and evolve in order to create various ways for audiences to get their fill of news from their brand. As the reading notes, new media journalism allows more in depth, up to date and personal coverage of news events. Viewers can become reporters, like in the case of the Australian Black Saturday Bushfires or the September 11 terrorists attacks, this new practice is known as Citizen Journalism.

As the above video notes to be a citizen journalist ‘you don’t even have to go to college‘, anyone can pick up a microphone, video camera or digital recorder and upload their story online. It is solely because of the advances in technology that Citizen Journalist exist and thrive. This however creates some animosity between old media journalist and new media journalists. Old media journalist, who’ve worked for years in print and broadcast, often refuse to see citizen journalism as a legitimate form of news coverage.

One Tree Hills’ Haley and Brooke think New media and Old media should just get along.

However New media journalism has reinvigorated the media, as much as some more traditional news companies would object, it has excited both audiences and potential new journalists. The possibilities of the media are now limitless.

“We are all reporters now.”

(Day, 2005, p. 2)