Jim Brady, vice president and executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, spoke today in a panel titled The Impact of Journalism and Social Media on Newspapers at the 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism that reporters have started to get bragging rights from how many bloggers are writing about their stories. Makes one wonder whether the scoop still matters of whether now it is just who starts the dialogues. If journalists begin to judge themselves on how much talk they get in the blogosphere, what prevents sensationalism? Regardless of my concern, it is still an interesting development in online journalism.

Through byline linking, the Washingtonpost.com has developed a dialogue with their readers. Brady said many of the reporters even respond frequently to comments as long as they are not just abusive junk–like you kids that use the asterik too much.

Editor Juan Carlos Lujan Zavala presented a pretty interesting presentation on his citizen journalism publication at ElComercio.com.pe. In Lima, Peru, he is getting thousands of comments on popular stories like the ones covering the upcoming elections in Peru. They run commercials encouraging everyone to find their inner journalist including a pretty funny one about a guy taking a cell phone picture of a giant spider (can’t find a link otherwise I would post it). Do we have as innovative a citizen journalism publication here?

Scott Clark, vice president and editor of the HoustonChronicle.com, has a reporter attacked by a roving band of jazz enthusiasts for the Chronicle’s poor coverage of the jazz community–getting rougher and rougher to be a journalist these days. As a newspaper writer, the interaction between writer and reader lacks the closeness and dialogue it has with the community. The Chronicle also experimented with using citizen journalism by having bloggers spread out throughout the coastline and cover Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. They let their reader blogs do almost anything they want. They followed a University of Texas Daily Texan reporter on a road trip to the Rose Bowl.

Fred Zipp, managing editor of the Austin American-Statesman, talked about starting up the reader blogs. Want to read about where the bluebonnets are in Texas? Check out the Stateman reader blog following bluebonnets…of all things. Zipp finds that the blogs are a great way to express opinion but not really creating traditional journalism–depends on how you use it I guess, but I would disagree. At least the community blogs are completely uncensored.

Robert Rivard, vice president and executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News, commented that community bloggers with agendas soon realized that they needed to do some audience building and cool down a bit of their zealotry in they really wanted to succeed. Other panelists–Brady and Clark–agreed that they could just let those who wanted to scream do so in their own little “dark corner” of the website and not be promoted by the site.

Public Relations Blog

During Q&A, the panelists were asked how they could prevent PR professionals from starting spin blogs within their community blogs. Frankly, they didn’t have much to offer in the way of prevention. There has been some recent controversy about a blogger who turned out to be a PR pro already, but none of the panelists could really offer up any method of filtering other than a general ability to smell something fishy and prevention of “spam” blogs.

Technorati tag: journalism, citizenjournalism, blogging, media, washingtonpost.

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Another article from the former PartyCampus.com that I wrote back in the fall of 2004. Not many comments from the PartyCampus.com readership on this one…

A recent article in The New York Times highlighted recent news release segments produced by the government to promote agendas or support initiatives such as the war in Iraq. Video segments were filmed and sound bites were placed praising the administration for their job in Baghdad. The same story also brought up columnists who were exposed for being paid by the government to write in support of the administration’s policies. Now, it is fine for the government or any institution to try and generate positive publicity. Celebrities and corporations are constantly throwing stuff out there to try and advertise products or themselves. All you have to do is marry Britney Spears, which isn’t that hard these days. If there wasn’t so much secrecy surrounding the White House, the Bush family might have their own reality show on MTV.

The problem with this practice arises when news organizations neglect to inform people that these video clips or printed news releases are made by another institution and not the news organization. Most people take what is in the paper or on the televised news to be objective reporting, so putting news releases on without attribution is comparable to lying to the public.

As the public of tomorrow, we shouldn’t let the world we will inherit become a manipulating commercial nightmare. Press releases have tried to put spin on news forever, but video news releases go out pre-formatted with interviews and commentary ready-to-play for news programs. If someone sends you your homework, you probably will just use it as is and not write “Made by my friend Mike” at the top of the first page. Video releases make it too easy for journalists to be lazy and not preface the report with a statement on its source. Small-town stations serving rural areas are especially likely to show these releases because they don’t have the resources to investigate themselves. Within those communities, no one would be able to scrutinize the news and have no other source to contradict the news released. Jethro and Paw would be none the wiser–maybe they would have been anyway, but they deserve a chance.

If this policy continues, pretty soon the news will be a series of commercials for various corporate and government interests. I know I don’t want to start seeing infomercials on my news broadcasts. I get enough of those in the early hours of the morning while recovering from the night’s festivities. Just imagine “1,000 soldiers have now lost their lives in Iraq, but you could save tons of money if you switch to Geico.”

Some media outlets, such as the FOX News Channel, have already been accused of spreading propaganda in their programs, and, if the media begins to air un-attributed news releases, all channels would eventually go the same way. It is not the place of the government to frame and report on its own functions; journalism and the First Amendment were designed to maintain a watch on the government for the public. It is also not the place of the government to influence columnists or influence them to gain their support. Columnists are not paid to write someone else’s opinion; people look to columnists as having their own personal biases, but not advertising for the highest bidder.

I can appreciate independent sources of opinion and news for keeping commercialization out of the media. Perhaps we will all just have to start going to more bloggers and Internet sources for our news. What has the world come to when “Diary of a FreaKaZOID” has more truth than CNN? While these outlets may or may not have their biases, in many cases they admit their bias. We expect a need to be skeptical of things we read on the Internet as opposed to what we see on the front page of the paper. Whatever the solution, I hope journalism will survive without being spoiled by a flood of government or corporate produced news releases because it is not fair to any of us.

With that said, we should all rush off to our nearest news station that we feel is not being responsible and burn that mother down–no kids, you can’t blame me because that is not what I am saying. All I am hoping to instill is a demand for morals, a foreign concept for some people during their youth and possibly their entire lives. It is these morals that will prevent media from becoming a commercial spectacle.

Technorati tag: Bush, Iraq, journalism, fox.

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I started college trying to be someone that I was not–someone majoring in something that makes money. I came into college thinking that I couldn’t just major in something that I liked to do. If I am paying thousands of dollars, I want a degree in something that will pay me more than my semester’s tuition per year, and my freshman year I started on my double major in computer science and journalism.

Computer science was the only other subject other than journalism that I really enjoyed in high school–mostly because our teacher let us have a great deal of free time after we finished our work. I know that it probably doesn’t sound interesting to most college students out there, but, in my defense, I also picked computer science because I want to make video games when I grow up–or at least get older–and computer science seemed to be the best degree to go in that direction.

Much to my surprise, the computer science program was not what I expected. Rigorous logic paths and data trees constantly discussed and displayed using webs and strings and lines. It seemed very easy to do for the rest of your life–if you were a computer void of all emotional impulses. I exaggerate this point a little, but, for me, computer science seemed to kill all creativity.

All of my classes were computer science classes my first semester; it was bearable, but I was miserable in those lectures. For a kid who slept maybe two days in class during his entire high school career, I was racking up an unheard of number of in-class naps through all my classes. Trust me–it wasn’t because I was out partying every night. Freshman year all my festivities were on the weekends. I just could not stand my classes. I couldn’t sit next to the kid that stomped your foot anytime you fell asleep for the whole semester, and my foot was starting to get some mean bruises.

My second semester was worse. I started taking my first journalism class in addition to my computer science classes, and halfway through the semester, I found myself hating every minute that I was in computer science classes and actually staying awake in my journalism class despite it being at 8 a.m.

By halfway through the semester, I finally made a decision and dropped the one computer science class that had me doing the most work. Managing to make it through my other computer science course, I finished the semester, and the last three hours of computer science that I would ever have to take.

Clicking my heels, I left behind all the tin men of my former major and became a fully committed journalism major.

Now, yes, I get jokes made about me by super-cool engineering friends telling me how much less money I will make or how much easer my major is–not true, but I am somehow completely fine with that. Of course, I plan on going into video game design anyway and making a quick fortune to rain down upon my friends from college while I spout off a good Dr. Evil laugh–but in the end, I am happy as a journalism major. Poor people are far more interesting anyway, and if I get really poor, I can just look forward to voices in my head to keep me company in my cardboard box by the highway.

Technorati tag: college, journalism, decisions.

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