Some classes at Reinhardt University require me to write blogs. I created this blog to keep my personal & school blogs separated.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Video Blog on Trend
This is my first attempt at a video blog, and I had some technical difficulties so please don't mind my errors! This project gave me a hard time, but hopefully you will understand the topic and get a few laughs at my expense :)
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Do you Prefer Citizen or Professional?
Who do you trust more to provide you with current news and
events? In the book Citizen
Journalism, we read that based on a survey conducted by Edelman PR, people
trusted their friends and peers. However, this book is a few years old and more
recent surveys done by Edelman PR (conducting annual surveys for the past ten
years) is showing that percentage of trusting peers, or “people like me”
dropped from 47 to 27.
With so many new technologies available on the market today, it’s much easier to get the tools that aid in becoming a citizen journalist. This can include using your cell phone or a pocket camcorder (I use the Kodak Zi8) to take video footage of wars or natural disasters and upload those videos to different news stations. Citizen, a.k.a. amateur, journalists also contribute to society through different online forums, blogs, and community posts.
http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/ |
Over the past several years, citizen journalism became the
“hero” in a sea of wrongful news. When popular news outlets were reporting news
in such a way that portrayed a certain group of people in a bad light, when in
fact it was just the opposite, most people turned to the Internet for the
citizen’s viewpoint. Many people began searching YouTube for amateur video
footage for the real stories.
Citizens on the scene in Japan during the 2011 tsunami recorded video footage of the actual wave. By the time most reporters got there, it was just water. Without the citizen video footage, no one would have seen what really happened.
Cropped photo on the left: Real photo on the right |
The photo sparked outrage with the Chinese people and a young student named Jin Rao took to the Internet. He created a website called Anti-CNN.com. From that point forward, he challenged the media’s credibility, but mainly when the topic was focused on
So, even though there is an upside to citizen journalism,
there’s also a downside. CNN was under fire again about a year ago when a
citizen posted to CNN iReport that Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder/Chairman, had a
heart attack. When that one false story got spread around, people panicked on
Wall Street and stock began dropping. CNN took scrutiny for it and tried to
explain that iReport is citizen-based and cannot be 100% filtered for false
stories.
So who can we trust to deliver our news? After thinking
about it, I’d say about half and half. The difference between a professional
journalist and an amateur one is the professional puts their name out on the
line for the public, and in doing so, also takes the heat when something is
reporting incorrectly. The amateur can post as an anonymous person and never
feel the backlash of a wrongful post. Professionals do train to perform their jobs in a better manner.
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