Well I've Never Been To Heaven. But I've Been To Oklahoma

My hometown paper is the Orlando Sentinel.

Before coming up to school, when I used to read the Sentinel regularly, I thought it was just a poorly-written rag that kept changing design philosophies and font sizes to make up for its shortcomings on the news front.

Then, when it launched Central Florida News 13, with its slogan, “All local, all the time,” I got a little more annoyed, because I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hear about Central Florida for 24 hours a day.

In this handout, Rich Gordon uses the Sentinel as an example of a paper making strides in the revolution of the convergence of media outlets.

And now, with the benefit of a couple years of journalism school, I’m inclined to agree with him.

I think that the future of journalism, with all its bells and whistles, needs this convergence to maintain the level of quality it enjoys in the present. If a single, “backpack” reporter is expected to report on an event, write the story, record audio, shoot video, snap pictures, edit himself, create a short package about the event for television and whip up something for online, the quality of his work in one (if not more) of those areas will surely suffer. If a news organization can put together a team to cover this event, each person a specialist in his specific field, the presentation will not suffer across all the mediums.

Or so goes the theory.

But, as with all of my silver linings, here come the clouds.

Gordon brought up the problem of the objectivity of one arm of this convergence when covering stories dealing with the other arms. He used the example of a newspaper TV critic passing judgment on programming put on by the TV station with which the newspaper is affiliated. I imagine it would be hard to maintain your unbiased stance in this situation, when your boss and the boss of the station you just bashed probably summer together.

There is also the remote danger, and this is still far-fetched, of too much convergence: all the news organizations coming into one. Like last week’s Gillmor reading, I can foresee your typical Orwellian dystopia if all of the media falls under one umbrella.

On a side note, I thought it was funny that one of the most difficult obstacles to convergence was stereotypes the print and TV journalists had against each other.

I imagine a sort of Jets versus Sharks scenario when I think about this. And if you’ve been in as many rumbles as I have, you know it’s true.

TMI????

Dan Gillmor gets into the sticking-it-to-the-man aspect of the future of journalism in this
chapter. And this is the part in which I'm most interested.
I see the limited information offered to the public from government organizations and major
corporations as a very real and scary thing. I'm not going to call it fascism, because that's
absolutely ridiculous, but I do believe that what we don't know can hurt us.
I'm glad the internet journalists took it upon themselves to raise a fuss when Trent Lott supported
Strom Thurmond's segregationist ideas. I'm dismayed traditional media needed an impetus to do the
same. This seems like yet another important thing that could have been swept under the rug by
complacency and I'm relieved the bloggers were there to make sure that didn't happen.
I also like the ideas of someone keeping an eye out on the spies. Programs like the Total
Information Awareness lose a lot of their power when their workings as not so secretive as they
would like. John Gilmore put the shoe on the other foot and started spying on the spies, just to
show them how it felt. This move, and others like it, got the program canned, but Gillmor points
out there are others like it. To me, this is a very important and effective use of new media.
On the other hand, when does this flood of information become too much? I know I wouldn't want to
see camera-phone images from inside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And if I want a
head of lettuce, I don't want to know what farm animals nibbled on it in the field: I just want the
cabbage. While too little information can create an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, I believe too
much information can do the same, especially when people start using it against each other.
And once again, Gillmor spends 22 pages extolling the virtues of this "inevitable" cyber-future,
with only scant ruminations on the downsides.
He goes into "benevolent" hacking, but what about the malevolent type? It certainly exists.
To paraphrase Arizona Cardinals, and former Northwestern Wildcats head coach Dennis Green, "If you
want to crown the information-sharing future, crown its (expletive deleted)."

The One Where I Use Way Too Many Similes

I’ve now read two chapters of We the Media and I’ve come to one inalienable conclusion: Dan Gillmor really knows his stuff.

While reading chapter two, I got this image in my head of him at his computer, rattling off the various forms the future of journalism will take from memory, probably licking his lips in anticipation.

The narrative thread throughout the first two chapters has been the evolution of the media from the lumbering dinosaur of the Hearst and Pulitzer days into the sleek cheetah of the decades to come. A cheetah that is easily accessed and to which anybody can contribute. A populist cheetah.

The rundown of the information-sharing forms Gillmor mentions read like a laundry list of the things I use when I go online, but I really have no clue what they do. I go on Wikipedia when I’m bored (but I don’t use it for research, like any good journalist). I partook in Napster back in the day. I even am now a card-carrying member of the blogosphere, thanks to this class.

I realize the implications these innovations will have on the future. I realize the sizeable impact they will have on my life as a journalist. I even sympathize with the guys typing in all the code to make all this possible.

But too often Gillmor seems like a public relations man, unwilling to consider any negative aspects of the “read-write web.”

I take that back. He spends one paragraph, buried near the end, explaining that these are just tools of journalism and “fairness, accuracy and thoroughness” must remain for its continued existence.

But then he goes on to envision a world where anyone can report the news without any help from what we know as mainstream media. This makes me wonder who is ensuring the fairness, accuracy and thoroughness Gillmor seeks. Surely not the guy with the camera phone taking an unflattering picture of a public figure and posting it on a message board. Or the guy using Photoshop to doctor a photo and push an agenda. If even professional photojournalists, people who could lose their livelihood over fixing pictures, do it, then what’s to stop an auto mechanic from New Jersey?

Andrew warned us in class last week about taking an all-or-nothing approach to the evolution of journalism. But it’s hard when we’re getting conflicting signals: conciliatory messages followed on the same page by revolutionary tracts.

I know my entries are starting to sound like the aristocrat arguing for the old ways as he’s led to the guillotine, but whatever happened to cautious optimism?

Every new thing is not the next big thing, especially in the world of electronics. Maybe I should dig up some eight-tracks and beta max tapes to prove my point.

Photo 3

This is the first part of the phpto assignment, continued after the blog entry

I Used to Have a Clever(ish) Title, But I'm So Not In The Mood Right Now

“Canon’s EOS D60 is the equivalent of Nikon’s D100; it costs around $2,200. Both the EOS D60 and the D100 easily produce quality 16 (yen sign?) 20 prints.”
Two questions come to mind when I read this paragraph. First: “Huh?” Second: “Who is the target audience for this piece? Because it’s definitely not me.”
Cheryl Diaz Meyer fills her article with industry talk like this that makes it hard for a novice like me to figure out what in the world she is talking about. But she also includes enough discussion from photo editors to make a cogent point about the future of convergence in digital media, digital photojournalism in particular. I think.
Much like the people who say that the influx of blogs does not signal the death knell for print journalism, Meyer argues that the rise of digital photojournalism does not mean the end of established photojournalism, just the need for the diversification of its practitioners.
She quotes David Leeson, a Dallas Morning News staff photographer as saying that cameras will soon be replaced by digital video cameras that have the versatility of function to capture moving images and provide a “frame grab” of high-enough resolution to be used for still photographs. The photojournalists of the future will have to have an eye for what works well on moving film, as well as framing certain shots so they will make effective still pictures.
But wait, there’s more. Meyer, who worked as a photojournalist in Afghanistan, also provides her first-hand knowledge as to the importance of satellite phones and other tools of transmission. The photojournalist of the future not only has to have the wherewithal to adapt to a changing medium when covering something in a foreign country, but must be on top of all of the technology needed to get his pictures from Tikrit to the Punxsutawney Spirit. Meyer listed 15 things that she absolutely needed to have to do her job in Afghanistan. I’m a guy who’s never used more than a cell phone, laptop, pen, notebook and tape recorder. This is a bit intimidating.
I agree with the point Ken Geiger makes about what the priorities of a photojournalist should be. He worries that the overwhelming amount of responsibility and equipment involved could detract from the quality of the content.
“The level we expect our photographers to perform precludes them from multitasking,” he says.
Meyer provides arguments from both the “full steam ahead” and “hold on just a sec” camps and notes that in a field as young as digital photojournalism, it’s hard to tell what the future will hold.

Mission Accomplished

I don't know why it keeps doing this to me, but the pictures are out of order again. It should be bottom, top, middle. They're in the right order in my depot folder. Sorry.

My God, I've No Idea What I've Just Done.

The first is the rough draft, the second is corrected...but I think the first looks better. Though I did get rid of some of the orange in the door...i guess. Can you tell I'm a beginner?

Every 5-7 Pictures Tells A Story, Don't It?

Pictures 2 and 3 should be switched in their order...I don't know why they're not.

I Couldn't Fit These Two (Photo Assignment 2)

Titles Are My Least Favorite Part

One thing I can’t stand is people structuring their arguments in pre- and post-September 11 terms. I understand the momentousness of the occasion, especially when put in the scope of the American way of life. But to divide all of history into cut-and-dry “B.C.” and “A.D.” categories is far too simplistic.

This being said, I think Dan Gillmor does a wonderful job framing the September 11 attacks as not the inception of the tools of new media, but their exposition as an important force in America.

His most effective tool in this objective was his brief discussion of the evolution of journalism. While I was reading his trip from Thomas Paine and the pamphleteers, through the muckrakers and into the state of the media at the beginning of the 21^st century, I was thinking, “This is not necessary. I already learned this in History and Issues of Journalism.”

But when I put this history lesson into the context of the rest of Gillmor’s argument, I realized it was pertinent and necessary. He was tracking the metamorphosis of the profession from its specialized beginnings to the somewhat impersonal age of the major news corporations and into the burgeoning world of more egalitarian journalism, with more voices and a more interactive role of the reader with the news.

I liked that he used blogs that became national phenomena after the attacks as examples of how awareness exploded in their wake. It shows the power that this new trend wields: the fact that Glenn Reynolds’ blog, which started out at personal, comical reflections is now very popular, largely because of his “coverage” of September 11. He provided something other than the mainstream media’s planes repeatedly crashing into the towers and people responded.

This article builds on Parks’ point of the forms of new media serving to fill in the coverage holes left by mainstream media. Unlike some bloggers who are proclaiming the impending death of traditional media forms, both Parks and Gillmor take a conciliatory, complementary viewpoint that I feel is more accurate. As Gillmor says, “If we can raise a barn together, we can do journalism together.”

Another thing this article did for me was confirm why I’m taking this class. Gillmor absolutely lost me in the middle pages, when he delved into the history of information sharing on the internet. I feel I need to start understanding where we came from, electronically speaking, if I can adapt and prepare for where we’re going. And I hope to take that away from this class.