Thursday 30 October 2008

Aliens!

Today I came across this rather amusing article in The Daily Mail from back in September (thanks to the genius spEak You're bRANES )

What planet does The Daily Mail live on? It's certainly a strange one, like the land in Northern Lights: "one similar to ours, but different in many many ways."

It appears to be a near-parallel universe rewound back to 1955 and where the most powerful person is a faceless evil PeeCee brigade and not, in fact, a right-wing Texan christian. And the good ol' ordinary folk have to live in cupboards wearing rags eating scraps foraged from bins cos we've been taxed out of existence by these evil PeeCeers to pay for foreigners to live in crystal palaces waited on by a thousand serving maids. The foreigners also control the ordinary folks' lives telling them what they can and can't do, until the ordinary folks can't do ANYTHING without offending the foreigners and just have to sit inside their cupboards all day long. Eating scraps.

But no one would want to leave the cupboards even if they could because the streets outside are running wild with hoodies trying to stab them. Or is it the foreigners who want to stab them? I'm confused.....

I have come to the conclusion the staff and their readers are aliens from another planet, and this 'newspaper' has made its way into our universe by accident. Because the world it reports definitely doesn't resemble the one I live in.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Digital Storytelling



"A picture paints a thousand words" or so they say, and with digital storytelling the pictures no longer have to sit on the page (or screen) confined to their box - they can fully come alive thanks to film and audio technology.

As journalists working in a multimedia age we have many different ways of telling a story available to us. Adding audio or visual content to a written story or vice versa may enable us to shine light on parts of it that would otherwise be difficult to highlight, or tell it with a new angle that may not have worked previously. And multimedia digital storytelling now provides us with ever more creative ways of presenting our stories.

The challenge for us will now be to decipher which medium is best for telling which story.

Monday 27 October 2008

Millions of Peaches

Recently I read an Adbusters article called Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilisation attacking those uber-trendy pointy-shoed neon-sunglassed Nathan Barley-esque "shoreditch twats" that most Londoners are used to seeing stumbling down brick lane or out of hackney warehouse parties at 6am.

It stated that "we’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum." Fair enough, I thought - so the 'hipster' movement has no ideological backbone other than how cool one can be or how wasted one can get. It's not raging at the world and seeking to change it the way youth culture in the 60s and 70s may have. But did it ever claim to be? Did it ever position itself as a serious 'counter cultural movement'? I don't think so. And does anyone take this whole lifestyle that seriously? It's just people dressing up and having fun, which they have always done - I don't believe that every single teenager of the past was trying to change the world. I'm sure there have always been ones who just wanted to party.

Then I came across Peaches Geldof's first column for Nylon magazine. Oh dear.

So in between spending her dad's money, attending parties, shopping for clothes and obsessing over being 'cool' little Peaches has managed to convince herself that she is actually part of 'a movement'. Yep, her exact words.

Of course there's nothing wrong with wanting to be fashionable and have fun, which is clearly what she's after. But don't confuse what you're doing with something that actually has meaning.

If only Peaches could see that the shallow, moneyed-up Nylon world she inhabits is nothing more than a trendified naughties version of the society pages of old. But she probably won't, and we'll have to see a lot more of self-indulgent deluded drivel until the world bores of her.

Tuesday 21 October 2008

The atheist bus - Web 2.0 in action!

Today I came across a brilliant example of what networked journalism can lead to.

Back in July, Ariane Sherine blogged on The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' section about religious advertising on a London bus that stated all non-believers would be sent to hell. She suggested, rather tongue-in-cheek, that all atheists reading her article should club together and buy a bus ad with the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life."

Thanks to the interactive nature of CiF it became clear that her readers were genuinely enthsiastic about the idea, with many pledging far higher donantions than the original suggested £5. And today The Guardian has announced on its front page that the atheist bus is go!

Would this have happened in a print world where the reader's only means of interaction was writing and posting a letter to the editor? I doubt it.

Networked Journalism

I wanted to be become a journalist because I wanted to document the world and people around me. I wanted to give a voice to those who don’t have one and make their stories heard. And after learning in more detail about networked journalism, I can see just how web 2.0 can connect us with people and enable us to achieve this.

When first learning about Citizen journalism, it’s easy to see it all as us vs. them: user generated content vs. trained 'expert' content, the public vs. the press, the ‘peasants’ vs. the professionals, as it were. But it doesn’t have to be a conflict. With networked journalism, both can work together to create exciting, relevant stories that converse with the readers rather than lecturing at them.

Jeff Jarvis, a networked journalism enthusiast, describes it as “professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.” And I think this sounds like a very exciting process to be involved in.

Through blogs, commenting, twitter and other such tools we can interact with the readers, share information with them, involve them in the creative process and get to know them inside out. One of the journalist’s primary functions is to understand and serve its audience, and web 2.0 can help us to achieve this as we engage in conversation with them. And what better way to find stories that really mean something to your readers than to get them involved in the story-making process themselves?

I know many of my fellow students remain sceptical, arguably even technophobic, about what we’ve been learning in this online module. But all this seems to boil down to is a fear of change and the unknown. Having worked in online media for a year before I started this course I am already familiar with much of what we’ve learnt, but I can still see how all these new concepts must be slightly overwhelming at first. But fear of change may blind you to all the potentially great opportunitiesit may hold. Stop running away from it and look at how you can embrace change instead.

The only potential pitfall I can see with networked journalism is if we become too dependent on it. Only 1% of web users interact with media outlets in this way on a regular basis, and we shouldn’t get lazy and just rely on them to fuel our content. There are still another 99% of people out there who we need to cater to and whose stories we can tell; we just have to dig a little deeper to get to them.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

A Tricky Democracy

Andy Williams lecture last thursday, on user-generated content (UGC) and the people who make it, got us thinking about the democratic potential of the web.

Citizen Journalism enthusiast Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, states that “Big media treated the news as a lecture… Tomorrow’s news reporting will be more of a conversation. The lines will blur between producers and consumers.”And yes, the web does offer this potential. If freedom of expression is a human right, then assumedly this should extend to all of us, not just those who have been trained as professional journalists. The technology of Web 2.0 means that content can potentially be made by anyone with access to a phone line and their thoughts, feelings and viewpoints entered into the media debate.

Also, it is well-reported that journalists are the least trusted profession – perhaps the internet may encourage the public to trust the media more if they feel they can engage in a two-sided discussion with it?

But unfortunately, this free speech utopia carries some downfalls. ‘Trolls’ and hoaxers set out to cause trouble and hinder the debate, perhaps damaging public trust even more. Cases such as the ‘Dorset Elks’, which has managed to find its way into several different news outlets, shows just how susceptible UGC is to these hoaxers. If readers know that anyone can upload unregulated content to sites such as CNN’s iReport, then how can they trust what they see and read?

And anyone who has read online comment sections will know they often bear more resemblance to a playground bully’s taunts than a mature adult discussion. The anonymity of the internet takes away the usual standards of behaviour we adhere to, and instead of constructively critiquing what they see and read users often resort to insults and name-calling. Rather than encouraging freedom of expression, the internet may scare ordinary people off speaking their minds if they find they are met with insults when they do.

The obvious way to handle these negative elements of UGC would be for tighter moderation of the websites. But if we attempt to silence the voices we find offensive, are we not acting in opposition to the democratic space we tried to nurture in the first place? What’s ‘regulation’ to one may be ‘censorship’ to another.

I guess it all goes back to the same freedom of speech debate that has been going on for centuries. “I disagree with what you say but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” – who does this right extend to? Holocaust deniers? Extreme pornography enthusiasts? I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions, but I’m interested to see how the online world debates them in my lifetime.

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Us and The Machine



"The Machine is Us/ing Us"

The name of the YouTube film shown to us during Thursday’s lecture brought to mind an old debate. I remember sitting in my A-Level media studies lessons with the words ‘are media consumers active or passive?’ scrawled across the board. Do we sit and take in everything the media machine feeds us, like a big hypodermic needle to the head? Or are we the ones in control, picking and choosing what we wish to see, hear and read?

And with the technology available in the form of Web 2.0, it seems that many people in Britain have become the latter. We can create our own content through blogging and Wikis. We can tailor our daily media diet to our own personal taste using RSS feeds. Previously we may have just ranted at the newspaper over the breakfast table, but now we can use commenting to express our thoughts the second we finish reading. Web 2.0 has given us a more prominent voice than we’ve ever known before.

But is this shiny new online world really the true ‘people’s democracy’ that it’s cracked up to be? Even amongst our course of media-literate, educated 20-somethings, the vast majority claim never to have blogged or used RSS before, and the task of signing up to social bookmarking sparked many frantic facebook status updates of “so-and-so is totally confused by mento and del.icio.us!!!” If even people like us are not fully up to scratch with what’s happening online, then what about those older, poorer or simply with less spare time? Surely there are many who just don’t have the option to become one of these new empowered, active media consumers? Where are they represented in Web 2.0?

For example, people who undertake manual work are not sat in front of a computer all day with google reader open in one browser window and YouTube in another as they tap away on Excel at the same time. If they own computer, it is likely to be used for practical, time-saving tasks such as doing the family shop at Tesco.com rather than writing lengthy bogs and uploading home-edited videos. And what about the many people living below the breadline who can’t even afford a computer in the first place? The fact that we can upload clips of terrorist attacks filmed on our mobiles to the BBC website doesn’t mean very much to someone without the money to buy a video phone. These people have no option but to take in what the media feeds them in the old-fashioned ‘hypodermic needle’ way because Web 2.0 requires money as well as some technical know-how. If a revolution in the way we consume and create media is indeed taking place online, then shouldn’t everyone’s voices be part of this? Or has it already been decided that the voices of the elderly and impoverished are simply not important or relevant enough to partake?