When I first found out about the live-blogging assignment, I was a bit skeptical. Obviously, live-blogging an American Forum is just a way to practice this type of news gathering; rarely are those forums that leave-you-on-the-edge-of-your-seat intense. Live-blogging is not for every news event, but after actually doing it, I realized even more of its shortcomings.
When the forum first started, I began typing away as if I were just taking notes, but then found myself trying to type full sentences. As I went back to make sure the sentences actually made sense, I noticed how much information I was missing in the meantime. Not every bit of information was necessary to get down, of course, but I realized just how much I was missing by trying to write in complete sentences rather than in my strange shorthand that no one else can understand. I was missing good quotes left and right, and I couldn't truly appreciate Chuck Lewis' mild-mannered sparring with Roger Aronoff over the difference between making "false statements" and telling "lies" in reference to the Bush administration. I could insert enough of my own perceptions about the mood of the panel, but trying to get everything down in real time took away from the depth with which how I normally cover events.
It's important to update to the Web as often as possible as a news organization in this competitive business, for sure. I do, however, think there is something to be said for taking the extra few minutes to make sure that the information you jotted down is correct factually and orthographically. You can live blog a Clinton-Obama debate and be the first to comment on a funny face Hillary made or an angry tone voiced by Obama, but when journalism becomes too much of a competition to catch a newsy sound bite first, a lot more can be lost in the news gathering process. Michael Massing, one of the panelists, even made a comment about live blogging and how bloggers are more prone to miss details and get facts incorrect because of the time demand on them. I don't think he realized how close to home he was hitting, considering about half of his audience was doing just that.
It is only natural that journalism moves toward the Web as technology advances, as this class has taught us so far. However, I think it's paramount that everyone who is even considering becoming a journalist thinks about the inherent pros and cons of a 24-hour news cycle while starting out his or her career. Breaking news is something every journalist has to deal with, but the basic principles of seeking the truth and reporting it should not be completely overshadowed by the race to be first.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
"Five Years of Media Tears" by Patricio Chile
The American Forum on Tuesday prompted me to reflect on how crucial the media’s role has been during the Iraq war. It is interesting to note that at the same time the war began in 2003 and developed since then, the world of journalism has been engaged in its own war.
This conflict in the media industry is a civil war, a divisive conflict with an often-awkward reconciliation between traditional print and broadcast journalism and the innovations of online reporting through blogs and other user-generated content. The battleground is a question: what is true journalism? The conflict raised questions as to whether the mainstream media covered the conditions leading to the war acccurately. The mainstream media and user-generated online media have also been tested during the conflict as to how well they can cover the situation in Iraq. Some have criticized too much reporting on the negative aspects of the conflict and others have said the media focuses too little on the downside of the war.
We all know that bloggers and user-generated content have added an additional element to the reporting of news: the average citizen. A practice no longer confined to radio programs, news channels like CNN now demand that viewers send in their opinions, photos and videos of news events. YouTube users have even acted as moderators on the 2008 presidential debate. Though the opinions of citizens can hardly be seen as true journalism, public involvement does well to point out inadequacies in political and media practices. As one of the panelists said at the forum, the 24-hour news cycle has stripped professional journalists of the ability to reflect on their content adequately. However, the blogosphere has picked up on their mistakes and has provided feedback on their coverage.
Bloggers have more freedom since they aren’t constrained by the formal rules journalists have to follow when it comes to getting sources and such. They are also not constrained by the pressure of having to sell their content to mass amounts of people. As Michael Massing, the journalist and the author of “Now They Tell Us,” said at the forum: “There’s a culture in which independent thinking is not accepted.” Thus, the online world offers the courage and freedom to not only express one’s opinion but to present facts that would normally be deemed controversial or against the status quo. It is this growing opportunity for dissent that is driving the changes in the world of journalism.
The panelists were asked during the forum whether they thought future conflicts would be questioned better, now that we’ve seen the consequences of limited reporting before Iraq. Post staff writer Michael Dobbs said anyone who thought the media was perfect was “foolish”. This is especially true today as news companies downsize and the public turns to the internet more. Most panelists agreed that big change should not be expected. However, I think that as citizens maintain their own 24-hour watch on the media and politics, there may be less room for politicians and journalists to make mistakes. Former Va. Sen. Governor George Allen’s “macaca” incident is proof of this. The other side of the issue is whether this new media source can be reliable with the information it distributes. Fact checking is and always will be a necessary practice. With almost 4,000 soldiers dead and many wounded in Iraq, we can certainly hope that this new watchdog remains reliable and vigilant.
SOMETHING FUN: BarelyPolitical.com, the Web site responsible for Obama girl, satires news, politics, and the mainstream media. Their provocative take on the internet as a source of news is shown in this ad for their site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnHqN0DN8A
This conflict in the media industry is a civil war, a divisive conflict with an often-awkward reconciliation between traditional print and broadcast journalism and the innovations of online reporting through blogs and other user-generated content. The battleground is a question: what is true journalism? The conflict raised questions as to whether the mainstream media covered the conditions leading to the war acccurately. The mainstream media and user-generated online media have also been tested during the conflict as to how well they can cover the situation in Iraq. Some have criticized too much reporting on the negative aspects of the conflict and others have said the media focuses too little on the downside of the war.
We all know that bloggers and user-generated content have added an additional element to the reporting of news: the average citizen. A practice no longer confined to radio programs, news channels like CNN now demand that viewers send in their opinions, photos and videos of news events. YouTube users have even acted as moderators on the 2008 presidential debate. Though the opinions of citizens can hardly be seen as true journalism, public involvement does well to point out inadequacies in political and media practices. As one of the panelists said at the forum, the 24-hour news cycle has stripped professional journalists of the ability to reflect on their content adequately. However, the blogosphere has picked up on their mistakes and has provided feedback on their coverage.
Bloggers have more freedom since they aren’t constrained by the formal rules journalists have to follow when it comes to getting sources and such. They are also not constrained by the pressure of having to sell their content to mass amounts of people. As Michael Massing, the journalist and the author of “Now They Tell Us,” said at the forum: “There’s a culture in which independent thinking is not accepted.” Thus, the online world offers the courage and freedom to not only express one’s opinion but to present facts that would normally be deemed controversial or against the status quo. It is this growing opportunity for dissent that is driving the changes in the world of journalism.
The panelists were asked during the forum whether they thought future conflicts would be questioned better, now that we’ve seen the consequences of limited reporting before Iraq. Post staff writer Michael Dobbs said anyone who thought the media was perfect was “foolish”. This is especially true today as news companies downsize and the public turns to the internet more. Most panelists agreed that big change should not be expected. However, I think that as citizens maintain their own 24-hour watch on the media and politics, there may be less room for politicians and journalists to make mistakes. Former Va. Sen. Governor George Allen’s “macaca” incident is proof of this. The other side of the issue is whether this new media source can be reliable with the information it distributes. Fact checking is and always will be a necessary practice. With almost 4,000 soldiers dead and many wounded in Iraq, we can certainly hope that this new watchdog remains reliable and vigilant.
SOMETHING FUN: BarelyPolitical.com, the Web site responsible for Obama girl, satires news, politics, and the mainstream media. Their provocative take on the internet as a source of news is shown in this ad for their site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FnHqN0DN8A
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
AU Goes Dancing!
The wait is finally over for alumni, students, and friends of American University basketball.
After nearly 41 years in Division I athletics, the American University Eagles are going to the big dance for the first time, after defeating the Colgate Red Raiders 52-46 in the finals of the Patriot League Tournament Friday.
If you were not able to make it to the big game, you can catch up on all the action you missed by clicking on the below links, which not only provide some great details about today's win, but also demonstrate how the media has come to represent AU in a variety of different ways including video highlights of the game, news stories about the team, photos from the game, and blogs detailing players and coaches reactions.
Once again GO EAGLES!
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
CNN.com's primary failure
(Screen shot of my laptop at 8:05pm)Spot the journalistic faux pas: On the night of four crucial primaries, CNN offered its most prominent right-panel advertisement space to Obama for America, the Illinois Democratic candidate's Web site. And, as expected, clicking on it redirected the reader to BarackObama.com, where he or she could learn more about -- or donate to -- his presidential campaign.
I’m not going to insinuate the existence of a pro-Obama media bias; as much as I believe the media has unfairly covered this election, speculative finger-pointing won’t encourage the likes of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to act more responsibly. Instead, I’m more concerned with CNN’s decision to include political ads on their Web site during such an important night in the primary season. To be sure, the ads rotate – out of sheer curiosity, I refreshed the page at least 10 times and never saw the image again – but the principles CNN violated are obvious: Even if a news organization (or, business) is overwhelmingly cash-strapped, editors ought to avoid ads that disrupt even the notion of objectivity. To do otherwise is to create undue suspicion, the prevalence of which damages any article or publication's credibility or reputation in the long term.
Granted, print media have a history of publishing politically motivated ads; MoveOn.org’s press campaign last year, for example, blatantly attacked Republicans’ Iraq war policy and ignited a firestorm of criticism. Nor was it the exception to the rule: The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007 that political advertisements in print tripled since 2000.
But while it’s difficult to gauge whether these ads affected readers’ votes, it’s easy to understand the reason for their heightened popularity. As seemingly everyone in the industry would agree, funding mass media's news enterprises is by no means an easy task. Newspaper readership seems to be declining as more readers embrace the Web, a medium with so much uncharted territory that advertising is a murky business at best, and the result has been an unpredictable and tumultuous economic climate that many news organizations have struggled to navigate.
In the search to break even, political ads are one way to fill the void. As The Washington Post reported during the 2004 election, some news Web sites were in fact courting political ads “in an attempt to earn a slice of the $1.25 billion expected to be spent on political advertising [in 2004].” And while we're obviously months away from possessing final numbers on 2008 political advertisements, we can say with certainty that newspapers and Web sites coveted every bit of the revenue they've received (or, at the very least, that CNN's does). Where else can they find such a steady source of funding?
Problematically, this perceived breach of objectivity carries with it an ironic twist. The Post article continues:
“Political ads on the Internet are not governed by the same rules that apply to radio and television, leaving news sites free to run ads without having to disclose who paid for them. Sites also are under no obligation to provide equal time to candidates or offer campaigns the lowest available advertising rates.”
Granted, there are a variety of reasons for this double-standard, ones that range from a Web page's space limitations or, coincidentally, the Web's lack of space limitations (to the extent that users can seek alternative viewpoints ad nauseam, in ways that TV and radio pioneers could not have fathomed). But while technology has changed the way that journalists disseminate political information, it has not revised the rules of engagement. The code still reads, "In the war between a publication's editorial and business offices, the prior never loses to the latter." Journalists thus recover lost profits through accurate, fair and balanced reporting -- which, to excuse my flowery prose, is both far less tangible and far more beneficial than any financial motivation.
But therein lies the struggle; it is impossible to encourage investigative reporting without sound financial backing; to that degree, maybe all of this concern over political advertisements is merely an exaggeration, and perhaps the CNN-Obama ad is truly benign. But if print is slowly dying (creating a revenue crisis) and the Web needs advertisers' attention to sufficiently develop (creating a revenue demand), political ads of this kind are probably here to say. The journalistic faux pas is slowly becoming fashionable, and what it means for political journalism largely remains unclear.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Newseum, hear us roar!
PHOTO COURTESY PRANKS.COM and MARGARET ENGEL
So the Washington Post an architectural review of what is sure to be the biggest thing in D.C. this year, save for the 2008 campaign. The Newseum opens here on April 11, but they let Post architectural critic Phillip Kennicot in for a sneak peak, as some Post photographers snapped away.
The resulting slideshow of images gives prospect visitors an inside look at a project that has been highly anticipated (but one that has been many years in the making.) It's not the building itself that has so many of us so excited, however. It's a museum, for all of us media dorks, celebrating the news.
While admission is going to cost a whopping 20 BUCKS (except for opening day April 11, when everyone is welcome for free), it's going to be well worth it. The 7-level structure features, 14 galleries, 15 theaters, two broadcast studios, a 4-d time-travel experience (whatever the heck that means!), one Wolfgang Puck luxury restaurant and a huge new complex of apartments. Just take a look at the Newseum's own virtual tour. It's awesome!
At 250,000 square feet, Newseum is sure to impress. They have 35,000 historic magazines and newspapers in their collection. Famous for their database of daily newspaper front pages online everyday, Newseum will display 35 papers' front pages in sidewalk displays. All of this and whole lot more to the tune of $450 million.
Now, I'm not sure about this $20 admission thing (there is no student rate) but the idea is there. Newseum is a wonderfully interesting and useful online tool, so seeing it in person is bound to something short of euphoric. Don't think for a second that I won't be the first in line for Opening Day on April 11. Besides, some of ABC's Good Morning America will be filming there that day. And I love me my Diane Sawyer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)