Oh summer, the things you do to me

Summer has gotten the best of me already. I went all last week without posting a single thing on this blog. Oops. But sometimes I think we need a little break from the world of social media to just let ourselves be.

Anyways, I'm back now. As I was catching up on my twitter feed and reading some other blogs I follow, I came across two posts that really caught my attention. The first reminded me of a post I did a while back. I was sitting in the cafe on campus right in front of a giant stack of newspapers and hardly anyone was picking on up. While I can't say that all students don't read the news because of this one moment I witnessed, one Harvard survey, mentioned in Tony Rogers Journalism Guide, found that only one in 20 teens and one in 12 young adults read a newspaper on a daily basis.

Are young people actually following the news online? There are so many different, new, exciting ways of delivering content, but are those methods sufficient? While teens today may not read the news because they can't relate to it, they should still have an interest. New technologies have given the public easier access to news but teens still ignore it.

Something young people are more aware of is social media. "Networked," a blog about digital journalism from SPJ, listed the Top 10 Social Media Best Practices. Definitely gave some handy tips, mainly warning not to just jump into a site without a plan in mind of what exactly you want to accomplish there.

It's amazing to see how many interesting articles I missed in just one week of not reading my newsfeed.

Holy Twitter!

So last night I participated in my first Twitter chat. I guess it's called a Twitter chat, I'm not really sure, but that's what I am going to call it for now. While I have been on Twitter for some time now, I was still a little shaky on the lingo. What does putting # before a word mean? Why are people using the @ sign so much?


Well I can say I have mastered the # and @. Every Wednesday night, there is a chat on Twitter about web journalism (#wjchat). People of all different experience levels participate and answer questions that are posted every five minutes or so. One of the questions I answered was "how do you make your idea have multi-platform potential? Are you thinking outside of HTML? Mobile apps, geolocation, etc."


So, I thought, hmmm multimedia, my new found love of audio plays a role here. I tweeted that everyone brings the video camera with them, what about a high quality recorder? And, who would have thought, someone tweeted at me! Ha! I couldn't believe it. It was great, I felt powerful. Everyone talks about how powerful Twitter is, but at that instant, I truly understood its power. People who have never met, who don't know a single thing about each other, but all share this common interest were all online at the same time, answering great questions and having great conversation about online journalism.


I guess I know what I will be doing on my Wednesday nights this summer. Can't wait. 

Sound bites from the full podcast

Here is a two minute clip of sound bites from my podcast on College Journalism Students. I am working on getting all the audio on one page for easy access. Until then, you can find all the episodes in each of their separate posts in the months of April and May.

Here we go:

"Can technology help make online content pay?"

Type "How to paint with water colors" into the Google search box and a whole slew of answers are at your disposal. A recent article from The Economist, discusses the use of content farms, websites that create content to drive up search traffic and therefore revenue. One of the largest of these "content farms" is Demand Media, which according to the Economist article "Emperors and Beggars," is a combination of science and art. Special software seeks what topics users are most interested in as well as how much revenue a certain topic will create.

About 7,000 freelancers write articles or make videos about each topic. They must have a "college degree, writing expertise, and a specialty." On average, they make about $20-$25 an hour.

Should this be considered journalism? The content posted on these websites is at best mediocre. The point gets across to the reader, and ultimately gives them the answer they were looking for. The writers get paid, and must have some sort of expertise to be posting articles. I have a hard time calling these writers journalists. Are they seeking out a story and finding answers? Or do they themselves already have the answers? The content of a story is what drives it, and if readers are getting what they want, and it brings in revenue, perhaps this is the future of our online articles.

Photo from: stylianosm on Flickr

Blasphemy

A tweet on my twitter popped up this morning with an article titled "Cable news is most trusted in new opinion survey."My heart sank a little at this headline. Then, the article proceeded to state that those polled found CNN and Fox news to be more trustworthy than other newspapers and broadcasts. Fox News?! Really?!! What is the world coming to?

Just wanted to share that bit with you today. I have so many posts I want to put up this week I just don't know where to start. Hopefully this little tid bit of info prompts some deep thinking about what your favorite news source is, and how trustworthy you believe it to be. More to come this afternoon.