Reading's Good Journalism

To Journalism…And Beyond!

lochieg — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 07:39:38 +0000

- Ah, “The Future of Journalism”… a chance to make outlandish predictions without fear of retribution (at least for a few years when I’m proven wrong). I’ve decided to take on the information offered in the leceture and the readings, and offer some prophecies.

I believe there will always be a market for newspapers. Hard copy, traditional newspapers – ones that come out daily. However, not exactly as we now know them. Hard news will probably be eschewed in favour of comment and features. This is because the web is, simply, faster to break stories. With the rapid improvement of connectivity (supposing Telstra catches Australia up with the rest of the world in terms of speed), people will have accessed news as soon as it happened, rendering newspaper copy obselete by the time it reaches the shelves. However, no-one wants to read a 2000 word feature on a Zimbabwean refugee’s plight getting to neighbouring Botswana on a 2 inch screen.

As far as actually breaking the news goes, it seems likely that newspapers will eventually employ more people in their online components than hard copy (or will be able to write/produce for both).

Radio and TV, too, will have their place. Sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing, and I don’t believe users will want to have to log in and download all their listening/viewing content for that day. Most want to sit down and “tune out” (mentally, that is). Plus, the nightly news on the TV will always be a time for people too busy to even look up the breaking news can get it all.

As for u-gc, more and more specifically u-gc outlets will no doubt pop up, but users will always crave the high quality grammatical and visual abilities of professional journalists.

Video Killed the Print Media Star?

lochieg — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:03:16 +0000

So, video journalism…It seems like – in terms of broadcast quality – the step down from TV cameras to any other kind of camera is HUGE. Anyone who has seen the quality of The Age or Herald Sun online sites’ video content could attest to this. The picture is grainy, and the audio is fuzzy.

As long as this quality is maintained, given the choice, people will probably always get their video content from TV. The newspaper reporters are getting there, but their visual reporting skills are simply not up to the standard of TV reporters, who are all makeup and body language.

This represents a significant gap in the market, and I believe if the TV stations offered an hourly news vodcast or even stream the whole newscast via their respective websites, there would be a lot of people who would tune in.

Triple J (who are way ahead in most areas of forward-thinking interactive content) have already done this with their radio news broadcast. Each hour the (admittedly 5-minute) news report is available at any time for the audience to listen to. In the TV area, too, they are ahead. The presenters on JTV have obviously had a lot of training and have been able to transfer their considerable radio skills to the TV format with aplomb.

Singapore’s New STOMPing Ground

lochieg — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:06:35 +0000

So first things first, STOMP stands for Straits Times Online Mobile Print. It is essentially the Straits Times online site, but it differs from other newspapers’ websites such The Age in that it is made up of entirely (well, in a sense) user-generated content. I sarcastically say “in a sense” because I believe any editing at all inherently discredits any notion of truly u-gc. That is, can you still claim to have generated a story if the end product no longer represents your “copy”?

Still, the site is an incredibly clever idea. It saves money by not having to pay its contributers, it gets news some larger outlets may be unable to get, and content only locals or citizens “in the right place at the right time” could have access to.

Given the choice, I would take professional content over u-gc any day. The simple reason is quality. However, this is often not possible, given events that no-one can predict, like the tsunami. In that case I, like many others, pretty much appreciate any content I can get, such is the appetite for news of it.

Doing the Write (for online) Thing

lochieg — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 03:29:25 +0000

“Writing for Online” is the creation of copy generated from broadcast scripts, newspaper and wire stories or material original to the medium. It is then digitally distributed to websites, newsletters and other dispatches or wireless and other devices.

Writing for online is often punctuated (if you’ll pardon the pun) by a sense of immediacy, since breaking news is often the main use of the medium. Simply, it is quicker to get a story online than it is to get the story into the next day’s newspaper or the next hour’s broadcast. A quick look at The Age website reveals a section actually devoted to breaking news. These stories are often very short, giving the basic details, and often end with the phrase, “more to come …”. This is because the site wanted to break the story, and will probably go into details in a few hours, as more come to hand, and as the journalist gets time to write them out.

Despite the limited time journalists have to write for online, in my experience the lead and other structural components are usually identifiable. Another characteristic of writing for online is the ability of hyperlinking. Again, in my expeirience, there is rarely hyperlinking within the actual copy; rather, at the end there are often two or three links to video/audio/visual content, or related stories.

Writing for online is basically a slightly mutated version of regular writing for broadcast or newspapers: sort of the one-day cricket to regular writing’s test matches.

iDonthaveapod.

lochieg — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:02:08 +0000

As someone who doesn’t own an iPod, I really don’t find the time for the whole podcasting thing. Without a portable music player, you need to sit at your computer and listen, where people with those players are able to listen to podcasts as they drive or ride the train.

This is a completely different means of telling a story – it’s now difficult to define the usually easy to spot parts of a story: lead, intro conclusion etc. It’s a new and interesting way to express the news, or even just general content.

So, beyond blogs, we now have moblogs (mobile blogs), which allow greater, er, mobility with information, meaning anyone with a compatible mobile phone can write a blog anywhere with a signal. We also have pod- and vodcasts, which are audio and video (respectively) forms of blogging. Though both have now evolved to be a means of transmitting entire TV or radio programmes – not really in the definition of blogging. Lastly there are vlogs, where a citizen or a journalist will record a video entry and send it in to a site.

Soundslides is a program that allows a user to put music to photos, making a slideshow-multimedia presentation. Such a presentation doesn’t really fit into any of the above titles. Such an easy-to-use program lends itself to the u-gc by allowing everyone to make a show.

Oh My Words!

lochieg — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:48:52 +0000

“Every citizen’s a reporter. Journalists aren’t some exotic species, they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them into writing, and share them with others.”

-Such is the premise (slogan?) of OhmyNews, a website contributed to entirely by citizen journalists. They write in with stories from anywhere in their World, and – crucially – are allowed to include opinions in their stories, so long as they’re well written. Possible reasons why citizen reporters do write in to OhmyNews include a sense of empowerment, the almost instantaneous feedback (depending on the revelatory nature of the story) and, of course, awards such as “News Guerillas of the Month”.

One problem with the “every/anybody” philosophy behind this website is the idea of editing. How can they truly claim that everybody’s a journalist if not everybody actually gets their story onto the site? It’s the same problem wikipedia faces when it proclaims the fact that anyone can contribute – except in their case the content goes up FIRST, THEN it gets looked at by moderators. In the case of OhmyNews, the content is looked at before it even gets to the site. This seems to be nothing more than glorifying freelance journalists, who can operate without such websites anyway.

Environmental Issues

lochieg — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:45:11 +0000

Unfortunately this week’s reading (Nieman) was in such a format (EM print newsbook) that I was unable to zoom in, and was thus unable to read the text. I was about to simply print it off when it struck me that this is an example of the continued limitations of online content. That I would have to at some stage resort to printing it off (thereby taking away its “online” status) into hard form shows the technology associated with online content is still not perfect (and, in this case, FAR from user-friendly). This part of the course concerned the online environment, which, in terms of advertising revenue, will only have newspapers to overtake after this year (according to predictions). In spite of this, I have seen numerous articles on the blog boom that stated very few people can make any sort of comfortable income from advertising on their blogs. Perhaps this speaks to the commitment of bloggers, who write more for the thrill/love of it rather than the money involved. The prevalence of news on the internet of course has repurcussions for the “mainstream” news outlets. They are used to more interactive interfaces now, and it is simply not enough for them to be spoken at every night with no means of reply or finding out more.

Our Generation

lochieg — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 04:09:34 +0000

This week’s area of study was “audience-generated content” or “user-generated content” (the terms seem to be interchangeable). The term seems to be mainly applied to blogs (short for weblog), but could also be said to apply to the introduction of readers’ comments on internet stories and footage/scoops/photos sent in to a news outlet proper by viewers/readers/listeners.The first blog was established in 1997, and are now so prevalent that 57 million people read them just in the US. Perhaps in response to the blog “revolution”, the BBC established its own user-generated content newsdesk. This was inundated by content in the wake of mass-witnessed events such as the London bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami. This is the area that u-gc shines: unforseen events in areas where journalists are unable to attend. Without u-gc, no multimedia would have been available for those events, nor stories from those who were there. Those events would only have been reported in hindsight.A recent example in Australia is when the train broke down in Sydney, and passengers had the presence of mind to film it on their mobile phone cameras. This illustrates one important point about u-gc: that it is only able to grow at the rate the technology grows. The coverage afforded the tsunami (for example) would have been impossible 10 years ago not because there wasn’t u-gc (there was), but because the technology simply didn’t exist to make it as easy to generate as it is now.

lochieg — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:05:59 +0000

Convergence is a difficult term to describe. Hm, not a good start, right? Writing a blog entry on a notion. A concept that needed to have a conference held in an attempt just to define it.

Convergence may refer to ownership. When we think of mass-media ownership in Australia, we naturally go straight to Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, and with good reason. It owns more media outlets in Australia than any other company. This is spread over many forms of media, too, not just confined to a single means of reporting the news.

Another form of convergence may be the coming together of what were formerly several branches of an outlet. The obvious example of this is online content. Journalists for The Age now not only write for the newspaper, but may report in text, video or audio formats on the website.

This effectively means formerly separate mediums are forming a sort of giant glob of a medium – spreading the workload, multitasking. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen. But, whatever convergence is,one thing we can supposedly be sure of is that is apparently is happening.