I have a dream

In the final lecture Steve Molk talked to us about his blog and how he ended up in Journalism. But coming to the end of the Semester made me all existential and I thought about what I would like to do in my journalism career. What would I do if I could do anything. And I am by no means sure of it, but there is one company that I have been in love with for a few years now that do exactly what I would love to do.

And they are The African Attachment. 

They are an independent production company in South Africa that do short films and documentaries and music videos. I found out about them when I was watching a short documentary on one of my favourite bands, Ashtray Electric, and discovered that they made the film. They then proceeded in making music videos for four of my other favourite bands (yes, four!):

 And they also worked on the movie Golden Globe winning District 9.  Now they are working on a documentary on Ryan Sandes, the Ultra-Marathon runner.

And they do the most amazing documentaries:

http://theafricanattachment.com/#showreel (do yourself a favour and watch this)

They are exactly what I want to do. I want to do documentaries on people, people that interest me. I want to work with musicians on their music videos (it sounds too good to be true). I want to affect people with the work I do, make people think, make people change. I want to make a difference.

So I only have one more thing to say and that is:

African Attachment- Please hire me?

Page One

In our last Jour1111 tute, we watched the documentary Page One about the going-ons of the New York Times.

I did not expect much, when we started watching this movie. But I was absolutely blown away. I know that part of it is the fact that I am absurdly in love with documentaries, but I was also moved by the whole industry of the New York Times. How that one newspaper has such a high reputation and such a history of being the leading newspaper- a newspaper that literally shaped the world.

If you haven't seen it I will give you the rundown: It follows the jobs of a few people in the New York Times and shows how the newspaper is struggling under the new media landscape of online news. It shows how the news is picked and published but especially focuses on how the newspaper is struggling in a dying industry.

What really moved me was the passion that the people have. They all work so hard to be the best, and despite the odds they keep going. And they are all really passionate about journalism. Which I find really inspiring. I want that. I want to have such a passion for my work, I want a purpose like they have.

The Times is a paper newspaper. And I am definitely a big supporter of paper newspapers. I know I am young, and of the new generation and supposed to be Internet and Apple obsessed, but I still have not gotten the hang of online news. I like it old-fashioned. I like the big pages and the fact that the news only comes around once a day. Internet media makes me uncomfortable. Because I feel like online media has so many competitors that they only write what we WANT to know, instead of what we NEED to know. It seems too much like a factory, pumping out stories every minute, whilst I can see the passion in the journalists at The Times.

Which brings me to my conclusion:

We are living in the age of LOTS of SHIT information.


Instead of Encyclopedias and books that have taken years to investigate and gather information, we have Wikipedia. Lots of information, yes, but unreliable at best. And it is hard to know what is true, because every other website also just copies off the great Wiki.

And then for news we now have hundreds of news websites, millions of blogs and billions of Twitter feeds and status updates on Facebook giving us the news. Not exactly great quality journalism there.

And instead of great films and documentaries, we now have millions of the strangest and worst videos on YouTube.

I know there are good things too, but why must there be so much bad things? We don't need that much. I sometimes long for the days when it was simple; when journalism was still one or two newspapers on a street corner and everything moved a little slower.

Investigative Journalism

For our final content lecture, we talked about Investigative Journalism. We all intuitively know what it is about- looking deeper into a story and finding out the real truths that people want to keep hidden.

I think this is a fascinating branch of journalism. And as a few of the quotes Bruce mentioned talked about- shouldn't all journalists be investigative journalists? I think in answering that question we come to the answer that I posed at the beginning of the semester- Isn't everyone a journalist? Everyone is publishing stories, doesn't that water down real journalist's work? I think journalists that are really passionate about their work and telling a worthwhile story and spreading the truth, are real journalists. That is what separates the average Joe blogging on the Internet to a full-blooded journalist. They are dedicated to going the extra mile to get the story.

Investigative Journalism is about giving people a voice that are not heard, it is about telling what is important and making sure the public knows what is really happening and making people accountable for their actions. In a way, I think it is the purest form of journalism. It is separate from agenda setting and news values and government control, it is there as a service to the public. 

One example of Investigative Journalism that has really changed the world is the Watergate case, where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the political scandals of President Nixon. It is still remembered as one of the most famous cases of Investigative Journalism. There have been many other reporters to uncover truths through their investigation. It is all about following you gut and seeing the story behind the story.

I have an incredible respect for Investigative Journalists. It is not an easy task, to go after a story that could be dangerous and to risk so much to find out the truth. And it is a very important task, one that is journalists' responsibility. These journalists really have to be passionate about their work to go in search of a story.

It is sad that Investigative Journalism is under threat because of the lack of money in journalism. And the constant newscycle puts more pressure on journalist and media companies to get a lot of story NOW, instead of there being time to get a real story. But I believe that as long as there are people passionate, and there always will be, Investigative Journalism will still stay alive.

Tie Dye

I really could not resist dedicating a post to the amazing art of tie dying.

For a event my college had this semester, we all had to dress in 70's themed costumes. So for the first time in my life I tie dyed a shirt. And let me tell you, it is more than a little bit addictive. Who knew how cool tie dye could actually be? It's quite easy to do too.

1) Get a tshirt, tie dye (from one of those cheap everything-stores), rubber bands and a sink.

2) Tie the shirt either in random places, or a certain way to make a patterns. I actually cannot help with that, I had no idea what to do so I just tied in in random places. I recommend Googling it.

3) Wet the shirt. I did not at first and it did not end well.

4)Dye different sections with different colours. Carefully over sink. And if you, like me, really want to have blue dyed hands for another 3 days (a great conversation starter - "Uhm, like, do you know that your hands are like blue?") I recommend not using gloves. Your choice.

5) Leave it in a plastic bag for a day.

6) Rinse out. Well. Fun fact- if you get rained on whilst wearing a tie dyed shirt that has not been rinsed out well, your skin will become multi-coloured. Also your underwear.

7) Enjoy!

CUPS SPORT!

In light of my recent post where I mentioned the sport curling, I decided to try some Agenda Setting of my own on my absolutely favourite sport in the world:

SPORT STACKING

It is the grueling sport where competitors fight against the clock to stack and unstack cups. It's all explained in the name really. Just watch the video. 

I can't even believe that anyone could move that fast.

Agenda Setting

Agenda setting is a bit of a difficult concept to get your head around. Like gravity and evolution, it is merely a theory. And this theory states that mass-media have a big influence on what the public deems important and how they perceive issues. Basically, it states that the more coverage the media gives an issues the more important we think it is. It is one of those theories that we can immediately see proof of. If we see a story circulating the news and Internet and social media, we will obviously think that it is very important because so many people seem interested in it. MY theory is that if the media started deciding that the sport curling (it's actually the most fascinating sport) deserves a lot of media coverage, it will easily filter down to the masses and make the sport well known. And this could be true for anything.

Agenda setting, to me, is very much tied up with News Values. News values are how the media picks what is important, and agenda setting is what happens to the public as a result of the media picking which stories to publish.

The first result of Agenda Setting is that the public deems a topic important. The second result is the more significant result and that is that the way  media portrays a story influences how people think about that issue. Bruce described it as "the pictures in our heads". This is very true; what the media tells us is almost always the only side of it we ever hear and that will be the way we perceive a story too. 

Agenda setting involves the way news stories portrays issues, how they tend to go with whatever topic is popular that week (bandwagon effect) or when and how they choose to publish a story. This can be good in they way that they convince the public of health issues and things, but it can also be bad if they twist the truth to fit their own agenda.  

The only example I can think of off the top of my head, is one of Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa (I sincerely apologize for all my examples always being South African ones, it just always seems to end up there).

A few years ago in an interview President Zuma reportedly stated that he had a shower after having unprotected sex with a HIV-positive woman to reduce the risk of getting the disease (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4879822.stm). This caused quite a stir in South Africa, because of SOuth Africa's HIV problem and the absolute inaccuracy of that statement. Trust me, I have been throught eh schooling system, and every school child from age 7 to 18 is constantly (to the point of near madness) being taught about every single aspect of that disease. Well, this statement caused a very prominent and famous cartoonist to draw Jacob Zuma with the a shower head over head in every cartoon he drew from then on.

(http://www.zapiro.com/Cartoons/32622-zuma)

How this relates to Agenda Setting ( I believe) is that because the media chose to magnify this issue and constantly remind the public about, made it a very prominent story. It could have gone unnoticed if the media did not report on it, but they did.

The theory has definitely been affected by new media, because information is given to us constantly and everywhere. And the influence of media can only stretch so far. People can only be influenced up to a point, and then they will make up their own minds.

Annotated Bibliography

A month ago, a painting went on display in The Goodman art gallery in Johannesburg of President Jacob Zuma entitled “The Spear”. This painting is part of a collection called “Hail to the Thief II” and depicts the president with his genitals exposed. This caused great controversy in South Africa, with the ANC insisting it be taken down as it Zuma felt “felt personally offended and violated” and says that “the portrait depicts me in a manner that suggests I am a philanderer, a womaniser and one with no respect. It is an undignified depiction of my personality and seeks to create doubt about my personality in the eyes of my fellow citizens, family and children”. While some insist this is disrespectful to the president, others insist that it is the artist right to freedom of expression that it not be taken down.

(http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/south-africa/120522/the-spear-jacob-zuma-painting-defaced)

This annotated bibliography will investigate the different mediums in which the story of the defacement of the painting was communicated to the public; through an online news article, a radio broadcast and online video.

CNN, (2012, May 22), Men deface controversial Zuma painting [Online Video], retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2012/05/22/sot-safrica-zuma-painting-defaced.enews-channel

In an online CNN video broadcast, a reporter explains how the infamous “The Spear” painting of Jacob Zuma was defaced. The video is recorded by an E-News reporter, and shows the act of vandalism. E-News is a South African public program and the video is rebroadcasted on CNN’s website. The information the reporter gives is enforced by the visual of the men painting over the painting and being apprehended. The video shows rough footage of one man painting a red cross over the painting and then another man covering it in black paint. The men are then apprehended by security. The entire video is narrated by an e-news reporter. The video is clearly roughly shot, as indicated by shaky movement of the camera and the background talking, and gives the story credibility as the audience can see that the reporter’s explanation is accurate. The entire story of the painting is told towards the end of the video. This is likely because the focus of this story is the defacement of the painting, not the controversy surrounding it. As it has recently been an important story in South Africa, it is assumed that the audience would already know about the painting, and the broadcast fittingly focuses on the current news. This video gives a thorough account of the vandalism, and has the greatest information on the actual vandalism compared to the other mediums that the story was published in, as it shows the actual events.

Brush Taken to Zuma’s Exposed Weakness, (2012, May 23), The Australian, retrieved from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/brush-taken-to-zumas-exposed-weakness/story-e6frg6so-1226363999425

The Australian’s online article covered the story of the vandalism of “The Spear” at the Goodman gallery. It gave an accurate account of the events that took place concerning the two men that painted over “The Spear” and another man painting the first three letters of ‘respect’ outside the gallery. The author also reported that Iman Rappetti, the reporter who was on the scene and who took the footage of the vandalism, initially thought it was a performance art piece, which is why the staff took so long to react. The author then gave some background to the controversy surrounding the painting, explaining that the painting was a comment on President Zuma’s previous sexual transgressions and the ANC’s ‘abuse of power’. It is also explained that the ANC was set to challenge the rights of the gallery in High Court. It then ends with the opinion of someone who saw the painting being defaced. As it is a short article, it does not go as in depth into the story as the radio broadcast for example, but merely states the important facts. It also gave a broader view of the story than the video, as the video was more of a live narration of the event.

Crook, G., (Producer). (2012, May 23). The Midday Report [Radio podcast]. South Africa: Talk Radio 702

Chris Gibbons, the broadcaster, is a well known and respected radio journalist. The Midday Report is the winner of the MTN News and Actuality Show of 2012, which verifies the high standard of this program and its credibility in presenting and analysing South African news. The program starts by giving an overview of the events surrounding the defacement of “The Spear” and how three men were detained (two who vandalised the painting and another man who painted the first three letters of ‘respect’ outside the gallery). Gibbons then interviews several guests; a reporter at the court where the culprits’ cases were heard, Ayanda Mabula, an artist that had created a similar controversial painting of Zuma a few years before, Cape Town premier Helen Zille about her thoughts on the painting, and the City Press editor about her claims that the Film and Publication Board were biased. Hearing the opinions of different people that are involved in the case gives a wider look at the story than any of the other mediums. Instead of focusing on the actual act of vandalism, this program goes into more detail about the motives of the perpetrators and the events after the defacement. Gibbons raises the questions of the ANC’s involvement in the case, as they provided lawyers for the perpetrators, which none of the other mediums mentioned. The program heard different opinions but only investigates one side of the controversy; people who are on the gallery and artist’s ‘side’. A more balanced program would have interviewed someone who thought the painting was disrespectful.

Lynn Rivers, P. (2006). Governing Sounds: Hate, Race, and Responsibility in Post-Apartheid Broadcasting. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(3), 219-231. doi: 10.1080/07393180600800783

The author, Patrick Lynn Rivers, is an Assistant Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which gives him authority in analysing the actions of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) in the post-apartheid era. He investigates how the BCCSA handled the complaints towards one song ‘AmaNdiya’ by Mbongeni Ngema. The song portrays Afro-Indians in a negative light, in regards to Zulus. The founding of the BCCSA is outlined, and how freedom of expression section in South Africa’s Bill of Rights relates to the case of ‘AmaNdiya’. The author discusses how the BCCSA had difficulty dealing with racial complaints and ignored the apartheid history of South Africa when handling cases that do not directly involve whites. He states that this should not be done, as the racial history still influences such cases. He then states that the BCCSA conceptualizations of race and gender were awkward when deciding how to regulate the media. His statement is definitely supported by many previous examples of complaints of race in media that he mentioned. The author concludes by saying that regulatory bodies, such as the BCCSA, have the power to decide what elements in history are to be preserved by how they react to media complaints. This article thoroughly investigated the regulation on the BCCSA in racial complaints of media by using apt examples and justified reasoning.

Conclusion

For every different media that a story can be told in, there are different aspects that are looked at. Every medium has different elements to their disposal. In the defacing of ‘The Spear’, the online article covered the broad facts of the story, as well as giving background to the events and what happened after the arrest. The video was more of a ‘raw’ account of the actions, as it showed exactly what happened and gave a broad overview of the background surrounding the defacement. The video is most credible of the actual events as it shows the audience exactly what happened. The radio broadcast took a different approach, and gave a short overview of the events and then went on to hear different people’s opinions about the controversy surrounding the story. By looking at different media platforms, it can be concluded that each medium has a different role to play in communicating the story to the public.

News Values

When I first heard the term "news values" this year, I thought it mean the moral and ethical values that newspeople have. But now I have been corrected.

News values are actually the "newsworthiness" of a story. The importance that a media outlet gives to a story and how much attention the audience will give to said story. I feel like I should have thought of this element of journalism before. It is one of those things where, after you learn about it, you go "ohhhhhh, but I knew that already!".

Because there is a MASS of news out there everyday, every second, all the time. And it is so logical that there must be some way to prioritize what to publish and what to omit. It reminds me of the Page One documentary we watched in the tutorial today; where someone said (forgive me for paraphrasing, I cannot remember all the words) that Journalists take the avalanche of news and information and shape it into the next morning's newspaper. And another great quote was used in the lecture about how "A sense of news 
values” is the first quality of editors – they are the “human sieves of the torrent of news”, even more important even than an ability to write or a command of language." (Harold Evans) And it is true, journalists need to take all this new information and decide what goes to the public. It is quite a responsibility, actually.

And to get to the actual news values; they are what drives every story. Something has to be in that story to make the busy modern person stop and read. And these values have been defined by several people, but obviously there is nothing set in stone. Nothing in journalism is set in stone.

In 1965 Galtung and Ruge defined the news values as being 12 big factors (and I may have stolen this off the lecture slides):

As the years passed many other people revised these news values, always keeping with the same idea, but explaining them in another way. Golding and Elliot created another list of news values in 1979:

Drama

Visual attractiveness

Entertainment

Importance

Size

Proximity

Negativity

Brevity

Recency (exclusives, scoops)

Elites

Personalities

And I could go on and on listing more news values. But you get the idea.

This actually explains a lot about my news digesting habits, as well as everyone else's. Just think of how you read a newspaper? Where you click on a news website? For me, I always head towards the world news, music news or huge happenings in the world. I really could not care less about the NRL or cricket or State of Origin (which people are VERY LOUDLY watching right now, as a matter of fact- something just happened, everyone is shouting...). Because even though there are universal news values, we each have our own set of values that determine what we think is important. And this kind of makes me forgive journalists a little, because I was upset that I read nothing about Zimbabwe or other places I care about. But all along they were just following news values.

Bruce mentioned another modern phenomenon in modern journalism: churnalism. 

This refers to the lazy, irresponsible, fast and shallow journalism that happens as a result of the growing need of having new news, now! Where journalism just recycles press releases to fill in the gaps. And this is the problem with journalism, the demand is to great, and the speed at which it needs to be produced is too great. And I honestly cannot think of a solution to this. We can only hope that journalist stay true to in their integrity. Hey! That actually brings me back to what I wrongly thought news values were- the ethical and moral handling of news. Maybe news values should have TWO meanings.

Ethics

This week's lecture started off a little differently than other lectures, we got pieces of paper where on we are supposed to decide if the ads that they were going to show us, were ethical, unethical or in good taste or in bad taste. And then we proceeded to see some very dodgy ads, mostly questionable because of their sexual innuendo's. Here are some of the ads we looked at:

It was actually an extremely interesting exercise, because I found it extremely difficult to pin point if the reason the ad is a bit uncomfortable, is because it is in bad taste or unethical. And sometimes I did not think, personally, there was anything wrong with it, but I knew why it would be questionable.

Which kind of demonstrates the point- everyone will see things differently. What I deem as inappropriate is very different to what other people might see. There was one ad we looked at, an ad about lamb chops that was banned. It feature Sam Kekovich making a political style speech about being 'truly Aussie':

(http://youtu.be/tt8wZ-xTKAU)

Now, I know that many people think it is funny or clever, because of it's exaggeration or for some unknown reason. But I HATE this ad. It makes me want to leave Australia on the first possible flight, and become a vegan just to spite the makers of this ad. Everything that it uses to make it funny, just makes me angry. I think it is because I am not Australian, and every day I have to adjust to this other culture. And what makes me like Australia is that it is so multi-cultural. But there are still people who think that it is alright to blame me for being different in the ways that I do things, and this ad reminds me of those people. It pretty much sums up everything I hate about Australia.

This ad is a prime example of how subjective ethics and taste can be. No one will agree on things if they all have different backgrounds and experiences. Which is why there are ethics codes.

The ethics codes are based on deontology- that there are rules to follow that show you what is right or wrong. The other options are consequentialism (that the ends justify the means, and what do you do fine as long as it ends up being the right thing) and virtue ethics (based on good character and virtue).

I understand what John Harrison meant when he said that it is better to have ethics based on virtue. And in a perfect, Utopian society, I agree. Things are not really black and white, and for every situation the right thing is different. But we don't live in a Utopian society. Not all people have moral values. Not everyone has the same idea of what is good and bad. People are too different, and unfortunately, too bad to let everyone follow their own moral compass when it comes to journalism. I honestly think that having ethics codes are the only practical solution.

I read an article about a journalist, Johann Hari, who wrote in his column how he had been unethical in his writing. He followed to say how he had taken words and quotes from other sources to help him write the whatever story he was writing about an interview when he did not have the right material.

"At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words."

(the whole story can be found at http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/09/unethical-journalism)

This is a prime example of how what YOU might think is right, really is not. And the ethics code would make this transparent.

Factual Storytelling

After countless hours of editing, here is my factual story:

And here is the link (for incase)

http://youtu.be/woPj8PZ30n8

Public Media

Last week's lecture was about commercial media, and this week we investigated the other end of the media-spectrum- public media.

Public media is media that is not profit driven, where the ultimate goal is to serve the public. As Australia is in a democratic society, the public media's role is to be unbiased and give needed information to the public. Unfortunately, with some countries where there is not a democracy, public media can sometimes be a platform for forms of propaganda.

Public media has a very important role in our society. It's function involves broadcasting about national heritage, identity, building and conversation. It can bring the public the information about public news, without having another agenda, as commercial media sometimes has.

This means that public media has some serious challenges. One, is definitely getting funding. Because it is not commercially driven, they need to have enough money whilst still being independent. Another is to get more audiences. There are so many media platforms, and all of them so shiny and inviting, that people have called public media too "serious" and "out of touch". This might be true, but I think it is quite refreshing to have some down-to-earth reporting.

One massive plus side to public media is their lack of ads. As Bruce so perfectly said:

"I am insulted by the ads, because I am assaulted by the ads."

Ads are horrible. Ads alone justify to me why people download TV shows from the Internet. And why I am constantly changing radio stations when I drive. And we are more intelligent than commercial media makes us out to be. We want real information. And we definitely do not want ads that make us feel like eternal 5 year olds.

I think that we, myself included, sometimes takes the public media for granted. Especially in Australia, where we have wide access to information, we do not really think about what a privilege it is. So many countries are under control of dictators or governments that censor the media, or control what information gets to the public. Here in Australia, there are several media companies that are there to spread information without government input.

Commercial Media

Now we have come to look at Commercial Media. This refers to profit driven media, which means that the main aim of this media is to get money, and lots of it, and not to give us the best information possible (as we all wish it would).

Now this can be in the form of subscription media, sponsored media or media subsidised by the Government. And the main aim of commercial media is advertising, social reach and (scariest of all) propaganda.

Now, we would all like to live in a world where we can fully trust on the media, any media, for the exact and all encompassing truth to every important event. But unfortunately, media has become so commercially driven that the wider public has become quite sceptical of what the media is saying, or more importantly, hiding. If it is all about money, then the control over what is published is surely in the hands of the investors? We have no other way of knowing the truth than journalists.\

Let's think about censorship for a minute. We are all a little bit afraid of it. I am scared. I am scared of the fact that so much of my knowledge relies solely on the ethical responsibility of the media. And we all know that is a little bit shaky. And we have all heard of government censorship in its most evil form in dystopian novels, and shrugged it off as a silly dream of something that might never happen.

"Winston’s work with the Ministry is to change history. He is involved mainly with articles in The Times newspaper, and he goes back and changes the text so that it supports the present. For example, if in the past Big Brother had made a prediction and it did not transpire, Winston would go back and change the prediction and destroy any evidence regarding the original entry."

George Orwell, 1984

Ridiculous. Ridiculous to think of in modern society. But there have been several unsettling examples in modern media that are clearly heading in the same direction. One is the so called "Secrecy Bill" that was passed in South Africa at the end of 2011.

You can read the whole story here or here.

Even Australia has problems with increasing censorship over Internet use. But I am by no means saying that the world is heading towards a totalitarian superpower, I don't think it will ever come to that. There are enough safe guards that protect the public from anything extreme. And as romcoms have been teaching me all my life; people hate being lied to. No, I don't think anything serious will happen. But I do think that commercial media can be a very bad idea.

Not just in the censorship world, it also results in news being dumbed down, news being reduced to scandalous gossip and news companies working only to please the public, and not to inform. Don't we have enough tabloids? Do we really want to know how Britney Spears lost her baby-weight or Justin Bieber gets his hair so shiny? As the marvellous Jerry Sienfeld said:

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jerryseinf379237.html)

We can never completely get away from commercial media. There needs to be money to fuel all the journalists and newspapers. As long as we do not compromise on the truth of delivering news, we will be fine.

Radio Journalism

This week we moved away from text and pictures, to the other medium: Sound. You quite forget about sound as a way of journalism and this lecture really opened my eyes to radio, which I had never really given any thought to.

We were all asked to listen to a podcast from the ABC where they interviewed 2 different broadcasters; Richard Fidler and Steve Austin and they talked about their experience in the radio field.

Rochard Fidler is the broadcaster of Conversations on ABC radio. I have actually heard several of his podcasts on the way back from the city with my dad. He talked about how radio is very different from television, and it sometimes acts more as background or a voice inside your head.

He explained how when he conducts an interview it is important to feed of, or react on what the interviewee is saying. And to have open conversations that leaves room for the person to tell their own story. This is all so similar to what I have learnt about conducting an interview for a story. To leave space for the interviewee to tell their own story, and to feed off what they are saying.

What really impressed me about what he said is that Silence is Powerful. I think it is great how radio and sound gives you the room to use things like silence to convey more meaning than a written piece could. Steve Austin also said that with radio listeners can pick up on lies or "fakeness" so much easier than in a video for example, because there is nothing to distract from what the speaker is saying. Radio has so many different elements at its disposal than other mediums.

I was also surprised when they mentioned that radio is actually becoming more popular. He contributed it to people being time-poor. I think this is very exciting for the radio industry, that it will never die out because people will always leave it on in the background or listen to it in the car. Even I, who never thought of myself as a radio-listener, have realised how often I actually do listen to it.

Since I could not end this post without adding some sort of sound-element, here is a song by the unparalleled Sigur Ros. Here is my justification, the song is pure sound- the singing is not actual words just random sounds. Pretty cool?

Robert Doisneau

I was just thinking of my post about pictures, when today I was happily opening the Google webpage and I saw that the fickle logo had changed to celebrate Robert Doisneau's 100th birthday. Well if anyone had an eye, the special talent for telling stories with pictures, it was this man. I do not even have to say anything, his pictures speak for themselves. Which is the beauty of his artwork.

Here are my favourites:

On a last note- does this picture remind you of anything? Well, I could not help thinking of:

Picture Stories

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story"

-Eetu Sillanpää

Beautiful words.

This week's lecture was about the other side of journalism- pictures. Bruce talked about pictures from their origin, to modern photojournalism- photoshop, news photos and moving pictures (new television). Now, it comes as no surprise that pictures are incredibly important in modern journalism. They are everywhere; newspapers, magazines, television, movies, graffiti, ads, computers. You just need to take a look at 99% of all Tumblr blogs and you can see that everyone is a photo journalist today. Because people like seeing pictures. It makes it easier for us to understand what a story is about, to place ourselves in the midst of an event.

The lecture explained how news pictures have developed through the ages, from cave drawings of events, to stained glass windows, to illuminated letters and more modern drawings published in newspapers. I find it rather romantic to think of the ways people have communicated pictures in the past. So much effort and talent into a immortal drawing, and now all of that happens at the click of a button.

Pictures soon developed to photographs in newspapers. The first published photo was by Henry J Newton in 1880 of Shantytown in New York. And we all know the rest. Now the problem is not taking a photo, but choosing a photo out of the million we are bombarded with. Photojournalism has escalated so quickly to be dominated by photos taken will iPhones, iPods, cameras, Canon's, Nikon's, surveillance footage, heaven knows what else. Imagine what it will be like in another 100 years. Holographs? Engraved gold? Singing cherubs? Teleportation? It is actually quite scary.

And now it is not only about taking the right picture, but it can be adjusted in whichever way we want because of the double edged sword called Photoshop. (<<< click it, I dare you)

Bruce showed this amazing example of the power of photoshop:

How shocking is it? That anything can be so subtly altered, that we as consumers would not even notice. As I have heard some people mention- no wonder women have so much trouble living up to media-beauty- it does not exist! This is why I miss (not that I was around for it, but nostalgia is my friend) the golden days when it was film camera developed in a dark room and smudged onto a newspaper page. Or hours spent on drawing a picture to resemble a person for a news story. It might have taken longer, but this modern power has me squirming in my seat.

Does anyone else find it uncomfortably similar to dystopian predictions? 1984, anyone? Brave New World? Fahrenheit 451? Hunger Games? That the natural, normal is not sufficient enough, that it needs to be altered and transformed into something unnatural to make it socially acceptable. Shivers.

Here are some examples of photoshop images that have been greatly misused:

Missing leg anyone?

Bruce showed this one in the lecture. I find it rather sad that she needed to be enhanced to be commercial in America. Also, I find it kind of funny all the same.

This one was actually a combination of two photos that made the e-mial forwarding rounds a few years back.

This one is rather disturbing. Someone photoshoped a tourist into a shot of the planes flying into the Twin Towers. Rather a dark side of photoshop, I think.

There is a whole list of other photos like these on The Guardian website.

Evil photoshop aside, to have a good news photo you need to think of:

>Framing

>Point of view

>Exposure

>Timing

>Capturing that elusive moment

Here is an example of one of the most famous photos:

This was taken by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I think this is a perfect example of how a picture can say more than any amount of words can. And I am a huge believer in words. But nothing can convey the message as strongly as this one picture can.

And with that I will end this exceptionally long post. Pictures have a power, sometimes, that cannot be expressed in words.

Text in Journalism

This week's lecture was given by one Skye Doherty and talked about the importance of text in modern Journalism. The many different news platforms and online media places, gave me the impression that photos are the main way that news is spread to the masses. But this lecture reminded me that with text you have much more control over what and how you present your article. Even with the pictures we have online, they need to be supplemented with text to make them searchable, since text dominates online.

With news and journalism becoming increasingly online-dominated, the articles written for mass communication has to adjust many things, including layout. It now has the additional importance of hyperlinks (handy little links that interlink different sites and addresses to an article), searchable titles, and be adaptable to different layouts. In light of the importance of hyperlinks, I have chocked this post full of hyperlinks to (completely random) links. Let's see how this goes.

Another important technique she mentioned (more a fundamental FACT, than technique) is the inverted pyramid. Where the important what, why, when, how, where and who is described. This is very important so that readers can immediately be drawn into the story, otherwise they will get frustrated and bored and simply not read further.

This also relates to the new shiny "features" online news gives journalists to play with. Although, it seems like a lot of extra work. The articles written look different on the different platforms they are displayed on; Facebook, news sites, twitter, etc. Therefore it is so important to have a good, attention grabbing and search-friendly headline and good introductory paragraph.

Here is an example of the devastating earthquake that hit Indonesia on the 11 of April, as shown on the Brisbane Times website:

First when you access the main page to read the headlines, this is what is shown of the story:

Note how the headline is short and contains the most probable words to be searched, and the only sentence shown has all the important information that people would immediately want to know. Then when you click on that link, this is the next page shown:

This has a different picture again, and has a little bit more information, but still the main sentence that was used in the first page. Then there is a hyperlink to the full story which looks like this:

This finally gives the whole story. This layout works really well, because it gives people the immediate information and they can then go deeper into it for more information.

Basically, journalism and news is based on text. Headlines, captions, stand-firsts, content, blurbs. Even with the new online and picture "direction" it is moving in, text will always stay fundamental to news writing and so it is important for us to get as much of a grasp of being good writers as we can.

Personal Media Use and Production Diary

Personal Media Use and Production Diary

Our challenge was to record our media usage over 10 days and analyse the patterns we have, and how they compare to those of our peers and then relate them back to Journalism and Mass Communication.

My total usage is summed up in the table below, and the pie chart displays what fraction of my total media usage time is spent on each type:

I spent most of my time listening to music on my iPod, then general searching on the Internet and then going on Facebook. This can be explained by the fact that music can be listened to whilst doing other things, in my case every time I am on my computer. I only use the radio and television sporadically, when I go home from college where I live, and do not have a television. It shows that I am definitely more reliant on new media, like the Internet, that I have to use it every day.

For this task, I decided to divide my findings into 3 questions, the first being:

1)     Do we use more Old Media or New Media?

Journalism is changing. It is moving from classic media types, like TV and newspapers and magazines and radio to new media- the Internet, social networking and blogs. So I have split my usage into Old Media usage and New Media usage, as seen in this chart.

It is obvious that I use New Media much more than Old Media. In the 10 days I logged my media use, I used New Media for 84% of my total time, and only 16% for Old Media. This shows what we have been learning so far; New Media is becoming much more popular than Old Media. The survey supports this nothion; 75.5% of my peers use the Internet between 1-4 hours a day (And I am right in the middle with 1.7 hours), but the majority of students only listen to the radio for less than an hour, and watch television 1-2 hours, or less than 1 hour.

Journalism is moving towards New Media, and journalism will have to adapt to the new ways. I used New Media every day, to connect with friends, do research and organise my plans. One of the reasons that New media, and especially the Internet, is so widely used, is because everything is posted online. We make plans with our friends on facebook and twitter, we look at movie times and public transport on Google, even our lecturers and tutors refer us to the World Wide Web for any questions or resources. It is all there! Why would people find a few different, expensive sources, such as newspapers and magazines when all the information is available at the click and a scroll of our mouse? New Media is easy, it is accessible and it is more “fun” for the younger generations to use.

Now that we’ve established that the Internet is used most:

2)      What do we use the Internet for?

I use the Internet mostly for researching or watching things, with minimal publishing and production. This differs from my cohort, as the survey showed that 10% twitter, 32.4% blog on a regular basis. This reaffirms the notion that Web 2.0 is about “prod-users”. Our generation get their information from the Internet, and then repost it or rewrite that information in their own terms. The blogging results might be a little bit inflated because of our compulsory blog, but the results still confirm that mass communication is incredibly important in our daily lives.

Lastly, I want to investigate how we, as Journalism students, get news:

3)      Where do we get our news from?

The survey results show:

The survey showed that most people get their news from TV, online newspapers and then actualy newspapers. The surprising result was that 48.4% of my peers get their news from facebook. I find this strange, because there is not really a respected news platform on facebook, it is all secondary information from other people, mixed with their opinions. This is another verification that we are increasingly using new media sources to get our news, therefore Journalism will need to move to online resources. I however, got all my news from mainly newspapers and also online newspapers. This is mostly because I do not have a television accessible, and enjoy reading a hard copy of news. But even I think that it is much easier to read online news.

Conclusion:

I was extremely surprised at how reliant I actually was on media. Keeping a log of my time spent on each different media platform made it obvious how much time I actually spent. When I woke up in the morning, I immediately felt the need to check my facebook and email. I listened to music most of the day. A very small portion of my time was actually spent on reading news or important information. It is clear that new media is used much more than old media and Journalism is moving in that direction as well.

YouTube is Powerful

Of all the interactive Internet platforms, youtube is probably my favourite. Most of my time is spent on looking at different music clips. Especially the acoustic versions of songs, or covers of songs. But watching some videos today reminded me of how powerful youtube can be. For musicians in particular. Without being famous or rich or signed to a record company, youtube provides a service that immediately advertises the musicians. Every day someone on facebook puts up a link of a song they like (or hate) and everyone can go look at it. And this can spread so quickly, I've realised! Every social network is so interlinked, that posting something on facebook or twitter automatically creates a chain reaction of hundreds, or thousands of people seeing something that would otherwise be unknown. And it is so simple, just the click of a button. I only need to think of a year ago, when the phenomenon that is Rebecca Black, graced the interweb. Forgotten about it already? Here is a quick reminder:

In the span of 2 weeks she had COMPLETELY taken over every form of media I was exposed to; facebook, twitter, text messages, conversations, even news articles and radio programs talked about it every day. Soon hundreds of parody videos and debates emerged over youtube.

This brought home to me how powerful interactive media can be. Had this video not been newsfeed-raping every person with a computer (or ears), the song would probably not have been important at all. It was simply the act of a few people talking about it on facebook or youtube that somehow created this viral miracle. I honestly believe that if the song had not been so widely spread, few people would have hated the song as severely as they do. "Worst song ever written", I believe is the most commonly used phrase in relation to this video. Even if I just think of the death-stares I have received from my friends when I accidentally hummed "it's friday, friday", I realise how influential "accidental journalism" can be.

If we say that every comment, every status, every post is seen as some form of journalism, then imagine all the negative reporting that was happening. This is largely the reason that everyone hated Friday. Basically, just because everyone else hated it. People are generally stupid. People are generally unoriginal. And people like having opinions and ideas given to them, because then they don't have to think of it themselves. Journalism can be so powerful, especially on the mass media platform we have today.

This brings me to the most recent and obvious example of this: Kony 2012. Don't deny it, you have reposted it, I know you have! Here is the infamous video:

Never would I ever have imagined that this one video would cause so much commotion and controversy. In the matter of days, this video was all that was talked about. I remember talking someone who mentioned that he watched the video one night, and it was at about 1 million views. He then left it overnight and when he refreshed it the next morning, it was at 10 million views. It was phenomenal.

I also remember the first time I heard about Invisible Children. It was in 2008 in my classroom in South Africa. We watched the video and I was so moved by it. I researched everything about it. I joined the group, signed the pledge. And honestly, I only thought about it sporadically over the next few years. And then Kony 2012 popped up.

Now, I do not really want to go into my exact thoughts about what this video is trying to do, and if it is succeeding. Because I do think it is great that people finally know about this issue. After years of the world being oblivious. And it is not as if I did a lot to help the cause. But the rate at which this got popular, did not make me think that people suddenly cared. It only reminded me of the ease at which we can control the masses.

Everyone was reposting it. Everyone was suddenly a social activist. The fact that there were many other, maybe even bigger, problems in the world did not really occur to anyone. I've seen how people blogged about how the popularity of this video made them believe in the power and goodness of the human race. It did the exact opposite for me. As condescending Wonka so cleverly states:

People like being part of something. People like feeling that they are important and showing off to everyone else. And this video seemed to be just another way for people to show off their personal "originality". Don't get me wrong, I know that getting the word out is good, and that so many people genuinely care. But I do believe the majority of people just want to jump on the band wagon of whatever fad is in this week. In a month everyone will have forgotten completely about it.

Journalism and mass media can be so powerful. The Kony 2012 and Rebecca Black videos show this. But this means we have to be so much more careful, because what we publish and what we say can have a huge impact on many people's opinions.