Jennifer Southee

IN THIS CHAPTER I LEARNED more about audience participation in contemporary news organizations and blogs. Crowdsourcing is when journalists give audiences tasks (sometimes paid and sometimes not) just like a professional reporter. For example, if a scandal occurs involving, lets say, mortgage rates, then the community affected will be able to give more vital information than a few reporters might be able to uncover. Of course there is a limit to crowdsourcing; you should use it to help your organization or blog improve, but according to Briggs there is a greater chance of failure if you rely solely on crowdsourcing to power your news. Another way to rely on readers is to use open-source reporting, which means that an organization or blog can put out their ideas for their stories up early so that they can attain feedback, sources, and other advice from their readers to help build the story. Yet another form of reporting is beatblogging: I wasn’t too sure about what it was from the book, but I looked up more information on beatblogging.org and found that it is a blog that focuses on one topic and allows anyone to comment, debate, discuss, etc. Pretty simple. Pro-Am Journalism I already knew about through CNN’s iReport. With Pro-Am users post their own content directly to an organizations website.

I DIDN’T KNOW too much about blogs except that they seemed like personal diaries which I didn’t see as having much of a place in journalism. After reading the second chapter of Briggs’ book, however, I realized that blogs are opened for doing anything and everything you want with them (depending on the context of course) and they are a resourceful tool when in comes to interacting with readers; after all you can’t make good news if you don’t know what your audience wants to hear. I would like to find an audience for myself as well because as a journalist I need feedback to know whether my writing is captivating and informative enough. Through this blog I hope to find my “blogging voice,” which Briggs said you find after time with practice. The book also had me explore different blogs to find out for myself the diversity among them. Not surprisingly I found the number one blog as ranked by Technorati.com, The Huffington Post, to be my favorite. In fact I was delayed in making this blog post because I got so caught up reading Huffington Post articles!

BRIGGS’ FIRST CHAPTER DABS in HTML and other computer terms that I was not very familiar with, and so I have compiled a list summarizing them:

• RSS: I’ve known for a long time that RSS feeds existed, but I didn’t know much about what they were. RSS feeds are short summarizing paragraphs of news or other information of your choosing sent to an RSS reader with a permalink to the article. RSSs are updated daily and seem to be an efficient way of obtaining news and other information, however I find that Twitter is even more efficient since you can have a live stream of information.
• CSS: HTML that makes webpages fancy.
• FTP: File Transfer Protocol “is a simple process for moving those big files that e-mail can’t handle.” They’re useful when you want to transfer a file larger than 1 MB to another server or computer. You simply download an FTP program, obtain the host address that you want to send the file to and wala!
• HTML: A little more complicated a subject is HTML which is the code that makes up a website. I tried to make a webpage with HTML code, copying the directions in the book and the best I got was this:

I did exactly what the book said and that’s what happened. I tried adding photos too and the same thing happened- all that showed up on the website is code… I didn’t even bother trying the instructions for CSS to be honest, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure out what went wrong in the near future. Webmonkey, a site Briggs recommended in his book for HTML advice and tutorials, seems to be useful and so I’ll browse that site to see if anything helps.

ESSENTIALLY WHAT I TOOK from the introduction of Mark Briggs’ Journalism Next was that journalism is not dying, it is evolving. The contemporary evolution of journalism as described in Briggs’ book is comparable to a wild fire: Fire comes with all of its destruction wiping out the old life, in this case newspapers, but what results is new healthier life, or online journalism. What the new wave of journalism delivers is innovation that old media does not. Before the newspapers were challenged by new media they fell into a habit of serving their benefactors and not their readers, but today journalists are closer than ever to their readers and there is more competition to please them. Briggs also points out online journalism is much more eco-friendly.

My assignment was to create a “media pyramid” which is similar to a food pyramid. Just like a food pyramid I have the media I consume the most at the bottom (The Washington Post, CNN, Facebook, and Masonlive)  and the media I consume the least at the top (Twitter). NOTE:  My media pyramid has since changed; I had just started a Twitter account when I made this pyramid and I use Twitter quite frequently now. I would say The Economist would be at the top of the pyramid now.