Category: Allie Boardman

1. When I take a picture of my younger cousins (11, 10, and 8), they instantly demand to see the picture as soon as I take. They have done this since they were toddlers, because to them, cameras have always been digital and come with an instant preview screen. When I was younger, on the other hand, you had 24 (or 36) pictures and that was it. You couldn’t delete, you couldn’t preview- you had to wait until the film came back developed a few days to a week later. How is this instant gratification reflected in social networking sites/ public lives? How has an overload of instant images changed our perceptions?

2. By 2010, have we as SNS users realized the need to control privacy settings? Have we accepted the public nature of SNS sites in general and adjusted our comments accordingly? Have we accepted that if something we post gets out in a negative way, there is nothing we can do about it?

3. The big stink about Wikileaks in the news lately is that the documents it has released about the Iraqi War could create safety issues for the United States and do harm toward the US Military’s agenda. The release of the Pentagon Papers had similar protests (that it would harm the government’s efforts in Vietnam) but the papers were leaked and everything was okay (except for the realization that the government had been lying enormously about Vietnam). Are Wikileaks causing the same type of momentum today? Or do people not even care that they are being lied to?

1. Goode mentions that citizen journalism, though mostly taking place on the internet, can include broadcast news using eyewitness footage from cell phones. But is the person who coincidentally took footage of an event that became news a citizen journalist or just a source? Is citizen journalism a conscious choice, or can one be a citizen journalist by accident? If providing the local news station with pictures is considered citizen journalism, then there have been citizen journalists for as long as there have been professional journalists.

2. I question the ‘metajournalism’  of rating, commenting, tagging and re-posting of stories as a form of journalism as well. Is that being a citizen journalist or is that just being an active citizen, using new technologies to spread news like how word-of-mouth works?

3. Obama as a brand worked. The logo, the website, everything about his campaign was synchronized and consistent, and Obama simply sold himself better than McCain. Have all politicians learned from this demonstration? Are politicians branding themselves better since the 2008 election?

This study focuses a lot on the emergence of citizen journalism, and the “Community Journalism” special report focuses on how citizen media has increased tremendously in 2009. The tone I get from this State of the News Media report is that it has to be one or the other- that there’s either traditional journalism or citizen journalism. And because citizen journalism is rising, traditional/professional journalism must go into a dark closest and hide.

Yet there are some events that every day people cannot cover with a tweet or a blog. There are some events that we absolutely rely on the professional journalists to cover, and any reporting of those events in blogs are taking their information directly from the professionals, not the scene itself. For example, CNN streamed and broadcasted the entire Chilean Miner rescue. From start to finish, viewers could either tune into CNN on TV or pull up CNN.com to watch as every single miner rose from the earth.

No citizen journalist could deliver this news in this broad a scale. Even a small non-profit news site could provide this kind of in depth coverage and send this message all over the world. Citizen journalists and professional journalists can work together- it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Professional journalists can provide the in depth, world coverage that a single person cannot, but a single person who happens to catch an event on their cell phone can report their footage as well as give it to the professional journalist to augment their report.

“What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.” Rhett Butler says this to Scarlett when the War has just started in Gone with the Wind. It could be argued one way or the other that journalism as a civilization is either being wrecked or re-built. If you look at the situation in a positive way, it’s being re-built (or re-structured).

The people who can profit from the re-structuring are those who can flow with the tide. The stodgy newspaper owners who are digging their heels into the dirt and refusing to adapt will not profit from this journalistic renaissance. Professional journalists who have a knowledge of the the industry but apply the guerrilla-like tactics of citizen journalism as well as adopt all of the different emerging communication media as their publishing forum will thrive.

1.  CNN streamed the entire Chilean miner rescue, and people from all over the world were able to watch online and on tv as all 33 of the men (plus the rescue workers who went down into the mine too) were brought to the surface. Citizen journalists would not be able to do something like this. Will coverage of huge events be enough to keep the traditional journalism business alive?

2. “What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.” Rhett Butler says this to Scarlett when the War has just started in Gone with the Wind. Is journalism as a civilization being wrecked or re-built, and how are people profiting from the wreckage/re-building?

3. Starting in January 2011, the NY Times will charge a flat fee for unlimited access for non-subscribers of the print paper (though a few articles a month will be free). Is this what the journalism industry is forced to do? Will this work? Will this be able to sustain the industry after the heavy losses that it’s suffered?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html

1. Chris Anderson divides the economics of cross-subsidies into four types of “free” categories: direct cross-subsidies, the three-party market, Freemium, and nonmonetary markets. The last category is anything that anyone chooses to give away, with no expectation of monetary payment (like Wikipedia). What the producers get in return, though, is attention and reputation. My question is: is there a point when the person who receives the reputation and attention has to take it into another category in order to receive monetary payment? At one point do producers have to stop collecting nonmonetary value alone?

2. Cell phone minutes were something that people paid different levels for, and were a big subject of commercials 3-5 years ago, but now cell phone ads boast of innovative technology features instead. Has the price of minutes gone down, or was it never a cost to begin with? (this refers to chapter two).

3.  21st Century “free” is just like 20th century “free.” Google, for example, gives away a lot of things for free because it makes money of advertising and a few small things that it charges for. How would stricter internet privacy (like prohibiting sites from embedding cookies on user’s computers) that would protect users’ personal information from getting to advertisers affect this “Free?”