Media Convergence in the digital era

I struggled with how I wanted to approach this exercise. Eventually, I decided to approach this assignment as an exercise to show how journalists and visual journalism are using the web to not only place stories on the web but are using the web to promote themselves in their efforts to find work, not just commercial work that will pay the monthly bills but meaningful work that is issue driven.

When Worlds Collide

• Media platforms converge in the digital era

• Websites bring newspapers, magazines, radio and television under one umbrella, one platform;

Online websites are an amalgamation of all media with news sites composed of print, video, audio and multi-media productions that combine all elements into one production. With this emerging digital revolution comes expanding access to information around the world without national boundaries or censorship to hinder the transmission.

With the developing growth of online websites, commercial, and independent, freelance sites comes the ability to offer more information, more variety of information than the standard media platforms from the past.

National Public Radio is an example of an evolving medium utilizing print, video, still photography and slide shows to augment what was in the past a strictly audio presentation of the news.

http://www.npr.org/

The above link takes you to the NPR website where you can listen to previous programs and even download previously aired programs. Some of the audio segments are supplemented with video, still photography and slide shows. The website has a section called "the picture show," that supplements the audio story telling with video, photos and slide shows. Examples are Andrea Hsu's "Seamstress By Day, Songstress By Night," and Claire O'Neill's "The Birds And The Bees . . . And The Plants," an essay with an accompanying slide show. Both stories are linked below

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/

They even have a You Tube site called "Radio Pictures" where the convergence of multi-media, audio, video and still photography, along with some written text presents the stories of people, sometimes in their own words, sometimes in narrative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIz2loDW1jw

The digital era has presented a new arena for freelance photographers, videographers and reporters to present their work and to solicit work.

The company Story4 is a multimedia organization of journalists that have moved from press journalism into multi-media reporting.

http://story4.org/

Examples of their work linked below, include stories about poverty in California's Central Valley, "Sowing Change" and a story about Big Sur, an area along the California coastline, south of San Francisco, in Monterey County, "The Nature of Well Being." Much of their work is done for non-profit organizations.

http://story4.org/portfolio/

http://www.bigsurlandtrust.org/

Another example of multi-media reporting in the digital age is the website MediaStorm. Brian Storm is the originator and creator. The site is sponsored by the WashingtonPost.com. Storm's style of multi-media reporting is at times advocacy journalism and he is unapologetic about his desire to use the media to effect change.

www.mediastorm.org/

http://mediastorm.org/0025.htm

This is a small sample of the work proliferating on the web. As the world of journalism evolves so does the platforms we have to do the reporting to the world. As one door closes, another opens, and with the global accessibility of the web many doors open.

Self-Censorship versus serving as a Witness

As journalist we serve as witnesses reporting on events, violent and non-violent for our readers and viewers. We bring our perception of the events as we witnessed them. I abhor violence and I hate it when the media exploit violence, the lurid, and the disenfranchised merely to make a profit. Yet, we have to report and photograph the obscene violence that is rampant in this world. We have to report, for if we don't, who will.

I am reminded of a photo-essay I did a few years ago on the proliferation of dogs and cats and how the local animal shelter did all they could to find this innocent animals homes but despite their efforts they had to put a number of cats, dogs, kittens and puppies down every week. It was hard on the personnel but it had to be done. One of the photos I published was of the workers putting down kittens. In hindsight, I guess I should have placed a disclaimer or some kind of warning at the beginning of the story because a couple of families were caught unaware when they came across the photo of the kittens being put down. I felt bad and my managing editor was upset that I hadn't given him a preview of the photo-essay, on the other hand the employees at the animal shelter felt I had covered a story that had to be told but with sensitivity. I felt bad for the family but I also felt that the photo and the entire essay may have helped provoke and awaken members of my community, my city, to this issue.

The issue of not linking to websites that promote pornography or graphic depictions of violence such as the beheadings of 12 Nepalese workers in Iraq can't be dismissed by ignoring its availability on the internet. These issues need to be addressed, by not linking to them do we deny they exist? I advocate some kind of warning system, perhaps similar to what we use in the U.S. to rate movies, PG, PG-16, R, X. It's an imperfect system and its flaws may create more problems than it resolves.

ICFJ Assignment#1

All right, finally getting around to posting a blog. I visited all the websites because I'm curious to see what is being done in the "industry." I work for a small town newspaper, circ. 18,000, and the overriding emphasis is on the online production these days, the newspaper is secondary. So, with all the emphasis on the website I am always looking to see what other websites are doing to bring additional viewers & readers to their sites.
So, lets talk about the websites:

Alarabiya.net: My initial impression was that this was an objective news site with an emphasis on hard news. The lead story was about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas criticizing the EU's decision on Jerusalem being a two-state capital. But beyond that story the rest of the website became a series of one-sided opinion pieces or stories with single sources, weak reporting and reading more as one-sided public relations by government censors. As a photojournalist I took notice of many file photos that really had no relationship to the stories they were used to illustrate. In fact I noticed comments on one side about Saudi women at a shopping mall being harassed that even the readers comments were critical of the photograph's non-relevance to the story and one reader's comment was to chastise Alarabiya for over use of this photo, that he had seen it used to illustrate a number of previous stories. When a website or a newspaper is too lax or lazy to make the attempt to cover the very news it is "reporting" on then it loses credibility with me. I feel the same way about using photo-illustrations for stories. I know that with some some stories you just aren't able to photograph the situation but with a story about Egyptian men complaining about divorce laws with a photo illustration it is another example of loss of credibilty. There are unattributed quotes in the story that one has to assume come from the main source, it's sloppy reporting and bad editing. Perhaps the story was lost in translation. When you go to the bottom home page of the website to read "about us" the description there is nothing about who the people are behind the website, who funds the website, who works at the website, who is the management of the website, there is a lot of information on what awards they have won and a lot of self-congratulations regarding how great the website is.
I guess the one asset I appreciated from the website was the number of story ideas I gleaned from the website.

Gawker: Right from the start, from the very minute I saw the home page I had no faith in the objectiveness of the reporting. The stories seemed to have a condescending, snarkiness to them, definite attitude in the reporting and very subjective. Even the Gawker title seems to telepathically send a message of non-seriousness. The design, relying on a series of thumbnail photos of celebrities tells me that this is a website devoted to infotainment, yes it's information, but of a most specious and irrelevant need to know brand. Gawker is more of an in-house hipster rag, being cool and teeming with irony and that sense of superiority. Gawker is not competing with the New York Times or the Washington Post. I get the feeling that Gawker is trying to be the anti-newspaper website. On the left column is a solicitation to "tip your editors." All newspapers rely on tips from their readers, so many stories come to us that way but the very tone and use of the word "tips." Tips sounds more like briefs or gossip, they're not asking their readers for story ideas but to send in your tips. There is a non-seriousness that permeates the website and the editors lamentably fulfill that non-seriousness.

MinnPost: This site really threw me off, first the home page design is so busy that it's tough to track stories and the first story I read was a sympathetic Q&A profile on conservative congress woman Michelle Bachman by a conservative journalist Michael Bonafeld. I quickly assumed that the website was a branch of Human Events but then when I went to read the "about us" I discovered the background of the people funding the site and the career backgrounds of the management involved with the daily operations of the site and I had to reverse my initial impression. I found many of the stories to have multiple sources and the reporting was on a first tier professionally, however some of the stories had a subjective slant that should be avoided in hard news reporting, especially when covering politics. There was a story on a state senator resigning to become a lobbyist and the reporter's lead was more appropriate for an opinion piece then news reporting. It gives me the impression that the Minnpost is an attempt to give voice to all spectrums of the political arena. That the attempt to report objectively is a vain and futile effort and to allow its reporters to report the news from their own subjective bias.

The one feature that I found most important to me as a reader was the "about us" bio information and the one website that I thought was the most open and revealing was Minnpost. Gawker and Alarabiya talked about their websites but they did not reveal any information about who is behind the website. Who funds the website and what are their professional backgrounds. All three website design's did not inspire me with trust and first impressions are important, I will be the first to admit that first impressions can be wrong, as was my first impression of Minnpost, but with many viewers and readers you only have that first impression, if you lose them you often times won't have them return. That's why design plays such an important role in the newspaper and the website.
Even though I found Alarabiya and Gawker reporting not to be of the top caliber I don't think that is the purpose of Gawker but Alarabiya is more deceptive in its presentation of the news and attempts to be the serious provider of mideast news when it is more a serious propagandist promoting the policies of Saudi Arabia.