“The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real word. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.” – John Markoff
“The audience is going mobile, so the journalism should, too.” says Mark Briggs.
Mobile journalism is the wave of the future, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. According to Briggs, one should bother with this new technological hassle for two main reasons:
A reporter on the scene doing eyewitness interviews and making firsthand observations produces a better story;
Today’s news audience expects to see and hear that story NOW, as it’s occurring, not tomorrow morning.
Journalism is all about instant gratification and getting to know what’s going on AS it’s happening. There’s no time to wait and the future is our present.
A list of some situations that render to mobile journalism are:
Criminal and civil trials
Important speeches
Breaking news events of ALL types
Protests, political rallies, parades, etc.
Sporting events
Grand openings
Some publishing options would be:
Mobile microblogging
Live blogging
Mobile video
Mobile multimedia
Mobile audio
In conclusion, Briggs states, “Many smart people predict that mobile technology will change the media landscape more than the mainstream adoption of the Web did in the 1990s. So, get a jump on it now.”
Submitting a news story in 140 characters or less? No problem!
That’s the new wave for journalists and this type of news publishing is called microblogging.
Microblogging is the fastest way for a news organization or journalist to report break news, promote other work, or just be an easier form of contributing information when blogging becomes intimidating.
The most popular microblogging website is… TWITTER. Twitter began in July of 2006 and has become a way to mantain a constant connection with the people around you.
Twitters rapid growth can be acredited to two things, it’s flexiblity and simplicity.
“In addition to making it easy for participate in the live Web, a microblogging platform like Twitter is an important social media tool that is critical for every journalist in the digital age.” – Mark Briggs
Microblogging has become an effective medium for breaking news. With the use of Twitter, subscribers can follow other Twitter accounts to get information rangings from weather, traffic, breaking news, sports statistics, and tons of other things that people are interested in.
According to Ellyn Angelotti, interactivty editor at Poynter Instritute, some guidelines to make your work stand out are:
Be informative.
Stay relevant.
Be instructive.
Include a link.
Reflect your personality.
Build relationships.
In conclusion of this chapter, if you have any hopes of becoming or being an effective journalist, START TWEETING and START FOLLOWING.
“News reporting methods such as crowdsourcing, open-source reporting, and pro-am journalism are become the focus for more and more news operations in the United States.” – Mark Briggs
This chapter focuses on these three main areas: crowdsourcing, open-source reporting, and pro-am journalism.
1) Crowdsourcing:Focuses on how community has power on a specific project and shows how a group of individuals who are committed to something can outperform a smaller group of experienced professionals.
Crowsourcing was a term coined by Jeff Howe in 2006.
It allows the readers to choose what should be covered.
It’s still an experiment in journalism.
2) Open-source reporting: The notion of using transparency in one’s reporting to provide some sort of benefit to one’s audience and in possibly get benefits in return from that audience.
A sense of openness and collaboration within journalism.
Welcomes the audience’s feedback.
Removes bias away from stories and makes it more about what’s being reported.
Beatblogging: a social network encompassed around a traditional reporting beat that bring everyone together.
3) Pro-am journalism: Unfiltered form that allows the audience publish on the same Web site that the professional journalists use when reporting their news.
“Everyone is a media outlet.” – Clay Shirky
Readers provide the “what” while journalists provide the “why.”
Readers/audience contributes to a bigger network such as CNN’s iReport.
All of these websites, and others, give news organizations and journalists an opportunity to collaborate with their audience and provide better information.
“Every college journalist should have a blog” – Mark Briggs.
I couldn’t agree more. This chapter, which deals with blogs, shows how news organizations and journalists have used blogs, how to get started with your blog, and how RSS can be used to beat the competition, how to manage a community of comments, and how to direct traffic to your blog.
Blogs have become the new wave of sharing information. They are FAST, INTERACTIVE, and MODERN.
Three characteristics define a blog:
Frequently updated Web site that displays entries/posts in reverse chronological order;
Posts include a headline, body, links to other information and may contain photos, videos, or other graphics;
Links for comments in which readers can post their opinions and thoughts on the topic.
WHY are blogs important? They have changed Web publishing and changed journalism.
According to Technorati, in October of 2009 the top 10 blogs were:
Important things to consider in your blog: name, theme, page elements, fonts and colors, editing HTML, new templates, widgets, extras, image header, edits to your CSS, and extras.
Bulding an audience for your blog:
Put your readers first
Organize all your ideas
Be direct and to the point
Authority with a personality
Be civil
Scanable posts
Links, summarize, and analyze
Specific headlines
Good attitude
Photos and screenshots are key
In conclusion, blogs have become an excellent source of news, a way to network, and a way to get one’s information out there.
The title of the first chapter in Mark Briggs book, JournalismNext, is “We Are All Web Workers Now”. He starts off the chapter explaining how important the Internet and World Wide Web have become in the life of a journalist. One quote that sticks out to me is:
“But if we take online technology for granted, we can miss some important opportunities to leverage it to gather information better, to communicate better and to create better journalism”.
Listed below are the main points I took away from this chapter:
The Internet is a network of connected computers that share lots of information while the World Wide Web is a way to access all this information throughout the network.
A cache is kind of like a temporary storage file that saves all your downloads while surfing the Web.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS serves as an information tool that delivers information directly to you via an RSS reader or Web brower. Saves TIME and puts everything in ONE place.
FTP stands for File Tranfer Protocol. Basically it’s a process for moving files that are too big for simple e-mail to handle.
HTML is the collection of various tags that tell a Web browser how to display it’s information on any given Web page. Ex: To bold a word you’d enter <b>word</b>.
CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables one to make changes to the outlook and design of a Web page.
XML is Extensible Markup Language. XML serves as a complement to HTML and is basically customizable tags to deceifer what certain data is.
