I enrolled in Journalism 101 because I harbored a fledgling interest in majoring in the field. I wanted to take this course to fully explore my options should I proceed with that ambition. Coming in, people told me that I was reasonably talented writer and public speaker, so I wanted to pay particular attention to broadcast fields like radio and television. Those chapters were indeed interesting, but other sections caught my eye as well. I've always had a great appreciation for film and literature, so the prospect of working in the movie industry or writing books is one that has my attention. Additionally, I spend a great deal of time on the Internet; even more so this semester while maintaining two blogs. In this generation where everything is converging into cyberspace, I feel like it would be smart to study some kind of web-journalism at the very least as a supplement to whatever discipline I choose.
As enticing as many of these chapters were, they also spoke of change, and the guest speakers who came into class also talked about how different there professions were now in contrast to how they were when they first started. Books are moving out of print, movies are digitizing everything from production to distribution format, radio is transitioning to satellite, and informative journalism is finding it harder and harder to survive without the web. I have certain misgiving about entering an industry like mass communication where so many structures are in flux. P.J. O'Rourke says that journalism is dead. Why then would I want to study it at all? Clearly it is only dead as we know it, but that unknown is what keeps my fledgling interest from learning how to fly.
I think if I decide to continue on a path through J-School, I will probably stick with my gut and declare for the Broadcast sequence. However, I will be paying constant attention to what is changing and what I need to learn to adapt to that change. I feel that will be the only way any of us can make it in the long run.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Assignent 6
Absence of Malice follows Miami journalist Megan Carter as she chronicles the story of a suspected murderer, Michael Gallagher. After a federal prosecutor leaves Gallagher's file on her desk (intentionally), Carter is compelled to report the story that Gallagher is being investigated for murder. Gallagher is shocked when the story is published and goes to the office of his accuser to attempt to make her reveal her source. When she refuses, he is forced to devise an alternate method of clearing his name. He manipulates both Carter, by getting emotionally involved with her, and the District Attorney, by bribing him to call off the investigation. Carter continues to dig into the case, so far that she humiliates a woman into committing suicide. The climax of the film sees all of the players in the court house where they discover Gallagher has manipulated them all.
This film covers a number of issues involving the ethics of journalism. First, Carter should not have looked at the file left on her desk, even if it was left there intentionally. The information she would have obtained there was not given freely and should not have been published. Second, Carter was wrong to publish the story on Gallagher without even consulting him directly. She made no prior attempt to contact him or bear witness to his character before publishing. Third, Teresa's story should not have been published against her wishes. The fact that Carter went against what Teresa asked caused her to commit suicide. Fourth, a reporter cannot become so obsessed with a story that they publish things that are not news. Several times, Carter published without the whole story. Finally, Carter never should have gotten involved with Gallagher. It is simply not professional to become emotionally involved with a source and the subject of your investigative journalism.
This film covers a number of issues involving the ethics of journalism. First, Carter should not have looked at the file left on her desk, even if it was left there intentionally. The information she would have obtained there was not given freely and should not have been published. Second, Carter was wrong to publish the story on Gallagher without even consulting him directly. She made no prior attempt to contact him or bear witness to his character before publishing. Third, Teresa's story should not have been published against her wishes. The fact that Carter went against what Teresa asked caused her to commit suicide. Fourth, a reporter cannot become so obsessed with a story that they publish things that are not news. Several times, Carter published without the whole story. Finally, Carter never should have gotten involved with Gallagher. It is simply not professional to become emotionally involved with a source and the subject of your investigative journalism.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Death of Journalism According to P.J. O'Rourke
The topic for P.J. O'Rourke's lecture tonight was "The Government vs. The Citizenry: Which is Worse?" After a lengthy introduction by the dean of the Journalism School, he got up to the podium and said, "Actually, I'm not gonna talk about that." He explained that he thought that was a pretty self-explanatory topic, and being at a journalism school, he elected to talk about journalism instead.
O'Rourke immediately informed the audience of some news that was probably not a big shock to them, given the setting: "The Internet is killing Journalism." The free content nature of cyberspace is ruining what was once a business. Journalists are now content-providers, and people don't pay for content. He says that when it comes down to it, journalism is about communicating, which is something the Internet excels at. He lists three reasons to communicate: to inform, to educate, to entertain. Journalists no longer get to inform people about what happened because they already know after surfing the Internet. The Internet also entertains much better than any journalist could, so the only thing that is left for them is to explain why. The problem there is that today's journalists are not good at explaining and generally refrain from doing so altogether.
The truth, according to O'Rourke is that journalism died long before the advent of the Internet. He's been in the business long enough that he remembers what it is was like to be a "paid rubberneck," a "licensed busybody." News reporters used to be told where to go, figure out what happened there, and then come back and tell people what happened. Journalism died when people stopped being reporters and started becoming professionals. O'Rourke blames the movie All the President's Men for dramatizing coverage of one of the most incompetent attempts at conspiracy ever conceived and thus inspiring a generation of young, idealistic college students to go to journalism school. This was a group of people who wanted to "speak truth to power" and become famous so that Robert Redford would play them in a movie too.
So why doesn't this generation of journalists explain the why when reporting news? O'Rourke says its because they don't have time. It's because a bunch of lofty moral standards take the place of why. He cites the coverage of the 2008-2009 financial crisis as one of the biggest examples of this failure. "Not only did the coverage of the financial crisis fail to provide explication, it sucked explication from our heads. I understood the whole thing even less after reading the Wall Street Journal," says O'Rourke. Coverage of the bailout and the health care reform bill was equally uninformative. He points out that the bill is 1190 pages long and that nobody, not the congressmen, not the president, and certainly not the people who are supposed to be covering it, have actually read it.
O'Rourke's solution is for all journalists to stop and look at the current events they are covering and think about how they actually need to explain them. He admits that if journalists move toward explication as their method of coverage, they may be required to be more objective. O'Rourke doesn't think this is a bad thing as long as journalists are honest and admit to their opinions instead of lying and trying to cover it up with a bunch of lofty, moral principles.
I found a lot of truth in what O'Rourke had to say. I'm someone who rarely watches the news because I don't feel like I get a lot out of it. I see the issues that are being covered, and they certainly sound important (sometimes), but I'm not given any explanation of why that is the case. I also payed close attention when he was talking about where journalism is going to go from here. He essentially admitted that he had no idea what we were going to do in this age, or rather that he had no idea how we would make a living off of the trade. Should I decide to continue pursuing a major in journalism, I am going to make sure I know exactly what I want to do and how I will be successful doing it.
O'Rourke immediately informed the audience of some news that was probably not a big shock to them, given the setting: "The Internet is killing Journalism." The free content nature of cyberspace is ruining what was once a business. Journalists are now content-providers, and people don't pay for content. He says that when it comes down to it, journalism is about communicating, which is something the Internet excels at. He lists three reasons to communicate: to inform, to educate, to entertain. Journalists no longer get to inform people about what happened because they already know after surfing the Internet. The Internet also entertains much better than any journalist could, so the only thing that is left for them is to explain why. The problem there is that today's journalists are not good at explaining and generally refrain from doing so altogether.
The truth, according to O'Rourke is that journalism died long before the advent of the Internet. He's been in the business long enough that he remembers what it is was like to be a "paid rubberneck," a "licensed busybody." News reporters used to be told where to go, figure out what happened there, and then come back and tell people what happened. Journalism died when people stopped being reporters and started becoming professionals. O'Rourke blames the movie All the President's Men for dramatizing coverage of one of the most incompetent attempts at conspiracy ever conceived and thus inspiring a generation of young, idealistic college students to go to journalism school. This was a group of people who wanted to "speak truth to power" and become famous so that Robert Redford would play them in a movie too.
So why doesn't this generation of journalists explain the why when reporting news? O'Rourke says its because they don't have time. It's because a bunch of lofty moral standards take the place of why. He cites the coverage of the 2008-2009 financial crisis as one of the biggest examples of this failure. "Not only did the coverage of the financial crisis fail to provide explication, it sucked explication from our heads. I understood the whole thing even less after reading the Wall Street Journal," says O'Rourke. Coverage of the bailout and the health care reform bill was equally uninformative. He points out that the bill is 1190 pages long and that nobody, not the congressmen, not the president, and certainly not the people who are supposed to be covering it, have actually read it.
O'Rourke's solution is for all journalists to stop and look at the current events they are covering and think about how they actually need to explain them. He admits that if journalists move toward explication as their method of coverage, they may be required to be more objective. O'Rourke doesn't think this is a bad thing as long as journalists are honest and admit to their opinions instead of lying and trying to cover it up with a bunch of lofty, moral principles.
I found a lot of truth in what O'Rourke had to say. I'm someone who rarely watches the news because I don't feel like I get a lot out of it. I see the issues that are being covered, and they certainly sound important (sometimes), but I'm not given any explanation of why that is the case. I also payed close attention when he was talking about where journalism is going to go from here. He essentially admitted that he had no idea what we were going to do in this age, or rather that he had no idea how we would make a living off of the trade. Should I decide to continue pursuing a major in journalism, I am going to make sure I know exactly what I want to do and how I will be successful doing it.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Assignment 6
I can think of a number of reasons why everyone's consciousness should be digitized and uploaded to the Internet, the most important of which is the lack of pollen. The rest all have to do with the fact that the Internet provides us with nearly everything we need other than food. My daily bandwidth usage is evidence enough of that. This being Easter weekend, I haven't been on the Internet nearly as much as I usually am, so I'll just try to describe a typical day's worth of surfing.
The first thing I do every day is check my e-mail. I have an account for school that I check via Mozilla Thunderbird first, and then I go on Gmail to see if I have any addition mail. These days most of my mail comes through school, but some people and sites still have my original account. If either of my brothers are on Gchat, I might say hi to them, but I'm generally not in the mood to converse first thing after waking up. My next stop is Facebook to see whatever there is to see. I've been pretty true to my original intentions for joining Facebook. I only use it to keep in touch with people that go to other schools or as a sort of social calender. I don't spend hours at a time pouring over the news feed looking for new photo albums to go through. That typically doesn't take up a lot of my time. From there I go to Cracked.com. Cracked is a humor e-zine that posts articles on a daily basis. The contributors will make fun of everything that they can from History to Science, celebrities to criminals. The humor there appeals to me, so I generally read a few articles at the start of each day.
The morning is the only time I really have a set routine for surfing. Everything else depends on what I need to be doing. My Spanish course is entirely online, so I have virtual class once a week and do activities in on online textbook. Two of my classes require me to blog, so I have to work on updating both of those on any given day. I use search engines, Wikipedia, and other tools to get research done or to find facts. All of my classes have some kind of course homepage on Blackboard or elsewhere that I check frequently to double check that I'm doing the right assignment.
While I'm trying to be productive, I also suffer from what I call Internet Induced ADD. In the middle of writing a paragraph I will lose focus and be drawn to some random video on YouTube. Perhaps a friend sent me the link on Skype and I needed to check it out as a mental break. Then that video leads me to another, and another. Soon, I've spent half an hour watching Star Wars kid videos when I meant to take a five minute break. Other times the Wikipedia article I'm reading links to another subject that's far more interesting and I take a long Wiki Walk instead of getting research done. Another site that I've been getting lost in a lot recently is TVTropes.org, an encyclopedia of plot devices and works that use them. As someone who is addicted to fiction, I'm incredibly susceptible to a time-sink like that.
That's a typical day's worth of surfing for me. The Internet is a great place, though people with no sense of direction need to beware because it's very easy to wind up somewhere you never intended to be or worse. I don't actually think it would be a good idea to live on the Internet alone, but still... there's no pollen there. That Yellow Haze is killing me.
The first thing I do every day is check my e-mail. I have an account for school that I check via Mozilla Thunderbird first, and then I go on Gmail to see if I have any addition mail. These days most of my mail comes through school, but some people and sites still have my original account. If either of my brothers are on Gchat, I might say hi to them, but I'm generally not in the mood to converse first thing after waking up. My next stop is Facebook to see whatever there is to see. I've been pretty true to my original intentions for joining Facebook. I only use it to keep in touch with people that go to other schools or as a sort of social calender. I don't spend hours at a time pouring over the news feed looking for new photo albums to go through. That typically doesn't take up a lot of my time. From there I go to Cracked.com. Cracked is a humor e-zine that posts articles on a daily basis. The contributors will make fun of everything that they can from History to Science, celebrities to criminals. The humor there appeals to me, so I generally read a few articles at the start of each day.
The morning is the only time I really have a set routine for surfing. Everything else depends on what I need to be doing. My Spanish course is entirely online, so I have virtual class once a week and do activities in on online textbook. Two of my classes require me to blog, so I have to work on updating both of those on any given day. I use search engines, Wikipedia, and other tools to get research done or to find facts. All of my classes have some kind of course homepage on Blackboard or elsewhere that I check frequently to double check that I'm doing the right assignment.
While I'm trying to be productive, I also suffer from what I call Internet Induced ADD. In the middle of writing a paragraph I will lose focus and be drawn to some random video on YouTube. Perhaps a friend sent me the link on Skype and I needed to check it out as a mental break. Then that video leads me to another, and another. Soon, I've spent half an hour watching Star Wars kid videos when I meant to take a five minute break. Other times the Wikipedia article I'm reading links to another subject that's far more interesting and I take a long Wiki Walk instead of getting research done. Another site that I've been getting lost in a lot recently is TVTropes.org, an encyclopedia of plot devices and works that use them. As someone who is addicted to fiction, I'm incredibly susceptible to a time-sink like that.
That's a typical day's worth of surfing for me. The Internet is a great place, though people with no sense of direction need to beware because it's very easy to wind up somewhere you never intended to be or worse. I don't actually think it would be a good idea to live on the Internet alone, but still... there's no pollen there. That Yellow Haze is killing me.
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