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Posts Tagged ‘media’

Fear: the reason for journalism’s meltdown

There is an unmistakable power in the written word. But what do you do when you go to work?

Do you groggily concern yourself with making the perfect cup of coffee before sitting down to skim-read your PR-laden email for potential stories, check the news to play catch-up on missed scoops and phone your favourite contact, hoping for a juicy tip?

Yeah. I thought so.

Wake up, people.

Do you really contemplate how lucky you are to be reporting the stories, rather than being the story, when you’re interviewing one of Downtown Eastside’s drug addicts for a sensational sob story before heading back to your comfortable law-abiding office to count the minutes until you can abandon the leather office chair in exchange for home’s lazy-boy couch and HDTV?

Do you think about the huge opportunity you have each day to cause reform, bring justice and give light to unspoken darkness and to ground the community …

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July 19, 2010   Tags: , , , , , ,
Category: Journalism   No Comments comments

#Collegejourn’s first global reporting project takes shape

Let’s face it: people are cynical about the future of journalism. But the decline in public trust, relevance and interest wasn’t your fault, or mine. It happened over many decades of the media neglecting trends and allowing unreliable or biased sources to undermine journalistic integrity. It’s our job to revolutionize journalism. We have all the resources we need — and now we have a plan.

#Collegejourn, for those who don’t know, is a Twitter hashtag that college journalists originally used to identify their comments as being a part of #collegejourn’s conversation. Hashtags can entered into the Twitter search box for easy access to the conversation’s history. #Collegejourn conversations now take place weekly at www.collegejourn.com and through interspersed Twitter chat, always branded by #collegejourn.

The chat group decided to create an international reporting assignment during one of the weekly chats in August. We wondered, as all curious journalists should, what we could …

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September 20, 2009   Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Category: Journalism   1 Comment comments

Eye to eye: #Collegejourn crew is planning a global collaborative journalism project

Just north of the national border dividing Washington state from British Columbia lies a world of cultures stuffed into a package known as Metro Vancouver. In that area is a university that houses a journalism major. Inside the branch of the school with journalism classes is a small ground-floor library with a plethora of cubicle study areas housing dozens of minds, one of which may be me at any given time, single-mindedly constructing a journalism project.

Think bigger. Outside of my cubicle, outside of the library, the school, the province, the country and outside of my perception of ideas are a world of other journalism students. How strong could we be together? What could we discover about our world by dissecting, researching, reporting on and sharing one theme hundreds of different ways?

Earlier tonight, #collegejourn discussed the possibility of such a project. It will be a global collaborative journalism project: one …

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August 23, 2009   Tags: , , , , ,
Category: Journalism   8 Comments comments

Scarred by the economy

A popular source of conversation among journalists is the tragic state of newspapers. Print is disappearing, a little at a time and permanently. Workers and whole newspapers are being uprooted. But you don’t need me to tell you that: just follow any journalist’s blog or Twitter comments.

I visited an employment agency this week for a short interview on the effects of the recession, and I was shocked. Several minutes into the interview, a question really started to bother me. Why are we, the journalists, so self-absorbed that we are oblivious to the state of emergency all other sectors are in? Why are we allowing reporting about ourselves, the media, to blind us from the public’s news? Isn’t it our duty to report the news that affects them? I thought, “Why aren’t the media reporting the devastation in Western Canada?” It is that bad. And it requires attention. Maybe if we …

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March 6, 2009   Tags: , , , , , ,
Category: Journalism   No Comments comments

What’s next in the quest to fund online news?

If you read my last post, Think bigger than micropayments, you may be wondering what steps are being taken right now to ensure a future for newspapers. Let me clarify a few things first.

1. Journalism will always have a future. Newspapers are only one form of journalism production.
2. Ideas are constantly being brought to light and critiqued. The two ideas receiving the most attention right now are micropayments, which I believe cannot attract an audience seeking quick, easy and unintruding online news sources, and endowing the press, which would create ethical problems, misplace responsibility and reduce hard work.

We’re living in a time where journalism is not just in print newspapers anymore. Unfortunately, the media have not adapted well to the changing times. The only way to usher them into the year 2009 is to form a new system that encourages competition, especially in multimedia journalism, while adapting to each …

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February 5, 2009   Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Category: Journalism, News   1 Comment comments

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