Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts

Interactive media and its relevance in today's news

A form of interactive communication in today's media is citizen journalism. The pros and cons of citizen journalism will be shown in the following.

An example that highlights this is from the tsunami that hit Samoa. Two videos from the New Zealand Herald website show the contrast from professional journalism to citizen journalism. This video portrays professional journalism. The quality is high and it's more focused on giving data, with the use of some amateur footage to back up the narrative. It focuses more on the outcomings of the event as opposed to the event itself. Contrasting the professional video, this video is representative of citizen or amateur journalism. It is of lower quality, and not so focused on the overall data of the event. Instead the video focuses on the event itself as it is a first hand resource. This gives a more emotive feel as there is less mediation, with no editing or voice-overs.

I feel both forms of journalism are needed to gain wider knowledge on more than one level. Through new technologies, we are now able to access and share information collected on an amateur level, such as the second video. Yet along with the emotive side, we still need the important data and information surrounding the event, making professional journalism also very important.

To Twit To Who? Privacy dilemmas on Twitter.


After speaking up in class about how I didn't like Twitter, I was intrigued by all the hype and caved in and signed up to an account. Intially it was boring, but as began following more people, mostly celebrities, magazines or corporate organizations such as record companies I began to enjoy it more.

However as my friends have yet to make the leap from Facebook I have few followers, presenting me with the dilemma of whether to open my account to public viewing to get followers to tweet to, or keep it on private so that effectively I'm tweeting to myself. After much deliberation about what weirdos might be seeing my messages I decided to make my account public, something which I have avoided on all other SNS' in the past and goes against everything we have learnt in class, however on Twitter it so far seems to be the better option and provides a greater level of interaction and entertainment.


Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was this interesting article I found at ReadWriteWeb.com  about the fact that Twitter saves everybody’s tweets and makes them searchable, therefore providing access to a huge historical database, taking citizen journalism to the extreme! One of the best things I have found about Twitter is it's accuracy and immediacy with breaking news, regularly beating traditional news sources, so in my opinion collating tweets for historical use would be a great idea; this also has the ability to provide a more democratic and equalizing voice for the people as well, creating a less biased account of history.


Source: Earthquake in UK? News broken on Twitter