Lecture Two: New News

Good news! The assessment date for this blog has been pushed back to April 20. I hope I get marked well, especially because I used Helvetica.

This lecture covered the different eras of technology that news has had to find it's place in. "Old Media" is the era of traditional media, spanning from the late 19th century to the 20th century, the era where newspapers were first created (although ti should be noted that this is not when news was first circulated by paper, that was thousands of years ago, go progressive Ancient Mediterranean culture!) and consumed on mass scale.

Then followed Web 1.0, the days where HTML ruled and textured tiled backgrounds were hideous. It was advertiser friendly and everyone was trying to get a webpage on the net, including newspapers, although their modern (and significantly more functional) iterations would not arrive until Web 2.0, the social web. With sites like Facebook and Twitter acting as mass communication platforms in a more personal manner, news spread faster than ever. Now we're approaching Web 3.0, the personal web, where users will be personally targeted based on their previous browsing habits and offered information most relevant to them. While the web seems to be getting more convenient for the average user, it may also be influencing media outlets to produce more 'entertaining' news stories.

"News as entertainment" is damaging the more traditional methods of presenting news, along with the sense of entitlement consumers feel about having access to news stories. At the lecture, we were informed that media outlets were having their income streams damaged by the need for online news; it's free and you can't intergrate classifieds into it (a large source of income for many newspapers). One solution is to charge users for exclusive content, however that can backfire and jeopardise the credibility of the media outlet. News Limited has taken this gamble, and it has been reasonably successful for them.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like any Fairfax papers are going behind the paywall (however I wouldn't mind paying for that). UQ also apparently has a good relationship with Brisbane Times, which is good news for me, because that will be stop number one when I graduate.

Another point covered in the lecture was that investigative journalism is expensive, which may be (and by 'may be' I mean 'most certainly is') the reason why it isn't done as often as it was. Which is a shame because there are a lot of corrupt people who could do with some laundry being aired on their behalf. This type of story needs to have all the information backed up by hard evidence, because they are libel lawsuit magnets. You need to have a strong resolve to complete a story like this, because they are difficult to compile. There are many options available to a journalist when they attempt to get to the truth, some of them are easy access, like Freedom of Information requests to the government; wading through all the other crap to find that truth, however, is difficult.

In summary, I am more enthusiastic about becoming a journalist than before. There will be frustrating obstacles, people will avoid me like the plague, I won't get paid nearly enough and I may get sued a bit, but I will educate someone, somewhere, and they will be better for it.

Lecture One

One of the first things the students in that dank basement lecture theatre in the Forgan Smith building in late February was that the philosophy of the course is "you are the journalist." It had already gotten off to a pleasing start for me, a Bachelor of Journalism student who was at university for the second time (after my 9 month stint at Griffith was terminated early, thanks to an unreasonable employer...).

The lecturer for the course is Dr Bruce Redman, a journalism veteran of 30 years, who is actually a pleasure to listen to. Some lecturers dribble on a bit, but at least his anecdotes were infrequent in appearance, and entertaining when they did appear. He recommended Tina Fey's Bossypants as a good read; I still have to get around to downloading that on iBooks...

The lecture covered the basics of the course, and also why it's beneficial, even if you don't intend to become a journalist (I want to become one, but I'm sure there were others in there for their own reasons). The part I found most interesting was the summary of challenges faced by modern journalism, such as changes in technology, public perception of journalists and PR people (we have News of the World to thank for contributing to the negative image of the profession), user generated content and citizen journalism, as well as the greatest blight of all (in my opinion), news as entertainment.

News is not meant to be entertaining, it's meant to inform and educate. If you want entertainment, read a novel. Or more appropriately, watch Today Tonight, that's fiction enough and it's in a digestible 30-minute chunk.

The lecture also covered our assessments, one of which was to blog the lectures. I've been a bit lazy and not written any until now (being week 5 of the semester), but I have taken thorough notes of each lecture, so I think I'll just post them up now.

Look out for the rest of the thrilling adventures of my lecture experience and other related ramblings. Yay.

Media Diary (Assignment One)

I tracked my media consumption for a period of ten days, and I found the results to reflect different behaviour from what I had expected. In recording my media consumption, I noted how much time was spent reading the news, watching news, watching general TV programming and time spent on the internet. I also listed time spent reading novels and playing video games, as I often learn things relevant to news and current affairs as well as learning new things from them.

Before beginning to record my media use, I had a firm idea of what I did with my time and what kind of media I used. I believed I did not spend too much time watching TV and surfing the internet, listened to the radio occasionally, played videogames infrequently, did not read novels and literature often enough and spent a lot of time reading news on my iPad. The results I saw at the end of the ten days, however, indicated that was not the case. I did not listen to music or the radio once in that period, spent far too much time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on my computer, watching TV mindlessly, wasting time looking at 9Gag and didn’t spend a lot of time reading the news. I was pretty disappointed.

This graph can also be viewed this way:

How I consumed media:

I have an iPad (like 13.7% of JOUR111 students do) and I use it every day as an internet device and e-reader. I source my news from online newspapers like 67.8% of my cohort, and I am also in the 71.1% who get their news from the TV as well. I rely on online newspapers to inform me of what’s going on, and TV news often delivers the same story later in the evening or the next morning, which expands a little on what I’ve already learned.

While the above graph shows that I spend marginally more time watching the news than reading it, I don’t think it’s reflective of how many news items I consume through each platform. It takes me much less time to read a few articles than it does to watch a segment on The Project or Sunrise. Those television programs also don’t have a lot of news stories one after the other; it’s more a simplified summary of a news, information or human interest story over a few minutes with a lot of opinion in it, rather than a ‘balanced’ report in a newspaper article.

After looking at the results from this diary, I think to better my own skills in writing and journalism, I need to spend much more time consuming news online and should probably vary my news sources more, to understand stories from multiple angles.