Attention all Journalists, Listen to what Students Want to See

The job this week was to go around and ask a minimum of ten students at Southern Connecticut State University how they would like to see the school news being distributed and what content they wanted to read about. Whether it is through a newspaper, a web site or blog (online news), radio show or mobile access. With technology's growth in the past few years, one may guess as to how most college students would want to read the campus news. A series of questions follow, trying to collect enough information to really find out what exactly would students want to have on campus for news.
For this assignment, the easiest thing to do was make a survey 2 different ways. One way was putting the questions up on to a survey site called Survey Monkey.

After making the survey online, it is a good idea to put the survey out there. I linked it to my Facebook so all the Southern Students I already had as friends could see it and, hopefully take the time to fill it out.  Linking the survey to social media sites is a good way to get it out there for people to see.  The other way to get a survey out to the people is actually printing out a paper survey.
I printed out several copies of the survey and handed them to random students and asked for them to take a few minutes out of their day to answer the six questions.   This way, more of a variety of students were able to participate in taking this survey.
This is the link to take this survey, Whoo Gives a Hoot. Twelve people responded.  The results were somewhat expected.  Websites and word of mouth are the two most popular ways to get the news around Southern's campus. The two news distributors that Southern actually has, the newspaper and the radio, are the least popular to the college student.

In "Journalism Next," Mark Briggs said that a good way to approach mobile multimedia reporting is to concentrate on the elements of the story independently.

Since technology is so advanced, students were asked if the news around campus kept up with technology, would they be more inclined to read the news about things happening on campus.  The majority of the students who took the survey said that they would be more likely to read the news; but what type of news do they want to read about?

The Majority of the students said that they would like to see more events posted and put in the news.  Music and entertainment was the next big category students would like to read about in the news around campus. There was only one a few that actually suggested other topics; technology and opinion columns.
What if the news was made mobile?  What if an app was made? Would college students actually download the app and read/watch the news more often?  Students said yes, as long as the notifications didn't get annoying like some other phone apps.
Students for the most part, thought the idea of a phone app of some sort would become popular among the campus.  Most students don't keep up with the news on campus, unless heard by word of mouth.  If an e-mail comes their way, most just ignore and delete them.  Hopefully, with the ideas and data the students have given us something can be changed to get them more interested in campus news.

Jobs in the Journalism World

Have you ever had somebody come up to you and say, " What are you doing? That career is not one you should be going into?"  Yeah, same here.  However, one may not realize the many opportunities journalism has to offer. With multimedia journalism expanding rapidly, more job field have been created.

In the book, "Journalism Next," by Mark Briggs, Briggs says, "New technology is continually being developed to make your journalism more meaningful to your audience. Why waste time longing for the old days, before the audience had so many claims on its attention? Better to spend the time exploring new opportunities--and you can do that by making sure you spend as little time as possible on mundane tasks such as e-mail and note taking."

A job like web production is a job where journalists have to have good editorial judgement and the ability to keep the website up-to-date, engaging and fresh.  For this job a journalists needs to be a detail-oriented person who can work closely with other people. For example, people in the editorial and sales departments. 

This job has a good amount of responsibilities: A journalist who is looking to work in web production has to know how to to upload editorial content; which includes stories, blogs, art and multimedia.  They will be able to edit and upload photos for galleries, and know how to design, manage and deliver e-mail HTML newsletters.

Qualifications that a journalist needs for web production are as follows: Must have experience with online publishing tools like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. One must know HTML, CSS, and HTML tables that are used in newsletters and eblast; and they must know standard internet protocols such as FTP (file transfer protocol.)

These qualifications mean that a journalist needs to know how to create, write, and keep an up-to-date website and/or blog. A journalist needs to know how to keep the reader engaged and know how to judge the content of the story.  A journalist must know their way around all different kinds of editing programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.
In the book, "Web Production for Writers and Journalists," Jason Whittaker, talks about useful and significant web production can be. On page two he says:

"The Web holds the promise of publishing and communication on a potentially global scale to anyone with access to a computer and online connection. Producing a website can be pleasurable in itself, developing technical,writing and design skills that culminate in well-crafted pages...At the same time, these skills--writing about interests and passions, creating graphics and laying out pages, programming scripts and interactive elements -are becoming more than ever at the start of a new century. Web production and management is becoming a career for more and more people rather than a hobby. As such,web producers need to understand the principles of how sites can work effectively and what abilities they need to develop for this new medium, both on a technical level and to communicate proficiently. "

I would want somebody with these skills to work at my news organization. Having a journalist know their way around a website and blog would be a good asset to a successful news organization.  Having a blog and/or a news website gives the organization a way to expand and get more viewers to read the articles that a new organization provides. I would want a person that has really good judgement on the story content as well as editorial judgement.

As of right now, I do not have all of the qualifications to qualify for this sort of job.  To be able to obtain a job like this I would need to take more journalism classes that revolve around multimedia journalism.  I would need to learn the skills to be able to editorially judge the content that is put in each story/blog post.  I would need to know my way around HTML, and learn the program eblast.  Knowing all this information would do wonders for a news organization.  It would give them the edge they need to receive more viewers and readers.
Technology is growing and growing and along with that journalism is changing to fit the means of these changes. 

Digital News Media Tools

As most people know, journalism has been changing as technology has changed.  Most newspapers have a website and some have even more. For this post I chose Hartford Courant. The Hartford Courant is the biggest paper in Connecticut and is the oldest in the nation.
When thinking about it, one wouldn't think that The Hartford Courant isn't terribly old, but in fact it is the oldest paper in the nation.  It originated in 1764 as a weekly paper printed by a man named Thomas Green; who, then eventually sold it to his assistant, Ebenezer Watson.  If you want to know anymore about the Courant's history click on this link.

Snow Storm coming our way.

The Hartford Courant is very structured in its online set-up.  They have the updated news on the top; which in the past few days a lot of it has been about the up-coming snow storm. They are a very up-to-date website.  The journalists that are in charge of their website do a good job of keeping every thing new.

latest news 

On the left side of the latest news, there is a strip of their latest news.  This enables the reader to look at other news articles that the Courant has written in the past few weeks with ease.

At the bottom of the page there is an option to read "More News."  Clicking on that will send you to another page.  This one has their breaking news coverage of all different media advisories (brief breaking news clips.).
Their website format and layout does not change from day to day.  The stories will be changed and updated.  However, the layout of the website stays the same.  This makes it easy for the "regulars" who read the Courant.

As technology has changed, so has the way the Courant likes to keep their readers updated. The organization started off being a paper, and then started by posting their stories online.  If that isn't enough, the social media sites have taken their publicity to a whole new level.

Not only did they have a newspaper and a website, but The Courant also has a Twitter and a Facebook; which are other way to reach out to their readers with news updates.  The Courant has four different ways to be read.  Viewers/readers have the ability to read it by print, their online website, Facebook, Twitter , and even an app for smartphones.

Their Facebook and Twitter accounts are just as updated as their main website. Every few hours another post or tweet has been created.
Facebook and Twitter are integrated into the main website at the top of the page. They have some of their tweets shown on the website after the breaking news.
If that is not enough to spread the news, the app makes it portable. The app is for people who are always on the go.  They can just take out their smartphones or tablets and read.

The Courant has really leaped in to the digital media tools and they are using them to their full effects.  Using all these tools just makes their viewers grow. For instance, their Facebook Page has 20,273 likes and their the Courant's Twitter has 28.1K followers.

In "Journalism Next," by Mark Briggs, Briggs talks about how important social media has become in today's world; especially in journalism.
"The rate of growth makes it obvious how important these concepts and tools are for online communities today," said Briggs.

Briggs talks about how it all began as comments on news stories and blog posts blossomed into a full social networking tool for news organizations with full participation in this new world of journalism.
These tools are a great way to connect with the readers more and build a better, stronger relationship between the journalist and the reader. News is not just reporting events to the public anymore.  It's a conversation.

Scavenger Hunt

Tweets can be just for fun, but others can actually be creditable.  However, what makes a tweet creditable?

When trying to find a Tweet about the Winter Olympics it was a struggle trying to find somebody close to home, talking about the Olympics.  Most people I found were just watching it because they had nothing else to do.  So most of this tweets are obviously not creditable sources to use in a story.

The only tweet I found close to actually talking about the Olympics was this one:

Opening Ceremonies!!! 😊💕👏 #Olympics #Sochi2014 🎿🏂 (@ Hotel Shukis) http://t.co/12hG967PhH

— Stephanie Shukis (@whimsies08) February 8, 2014

This tweet is just talking about the opening of the Olympics. The link that is posted to this is creditable. So I would believe this to be a decent source and would think about using it as a creditable source. The next one is about the snow storm that is hitting Connecticut this upcoming week. There has been talk about a big storm in the area. This tweet I found has a link to News 8 showing what the upcoming storm is supposed to look like.

“@8NEWS: Brace yourself, #RVA; more snow is on the way Wednesday! #8NewsWx http://t.co/K1FuOlQbDr pic.twitter.com/Z3qIOMtAUs”😎😎😎😎💃

— Ashley❄️ (@_ashleydynamite) February 11, 2014

Journalistic Standards and Policies when Blogging

When being an online journalist or blogger there are elements that you have to make sure you have and then there are some questions that you have to consider: Do you have the time to always be updating the blog?  Are you citing creditable sources?  Do you know enough about multimedia to be able to do everything that is required to run a successful blog?
Being a blogger or an online journalist, one has to keep the blog and updated as much as possible.  Not only that, but having other social media sites to spread the news more rapidly, could really help with increasing the viewers. A Blogger needs to know how to use the multimedia tools and sources that are creditable enough that people know what you are reporting is the truth.  Sometimes journalists use a term called open-sourcing. Open-sourcing is when a journalists opens up the idea of a story to a group of people to get their input on what is going on.
The video below, Gabrielle Coleman, talks about open-sourcing:
With technology advancing at a fast pace, and journalists and bloggers are trying to keep up with the changes. One must wonder whether journalists and bloggers should consider getting the public involved in helping with the news.
With all this new technology being developed it gives anybody who is anybody the ability to put things on the internet.  In Nieman Reports, David Turner, talks about the difficulties of what is found on the internet. In this article, there is questions about whether or not a YouTube video is real or fake, or if a post on Twitter or Facebook could be truth or false.
Some news organizations have their own online website, apps for smartphones, and social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, pod-casts, and blogs, streaming their news faster to their viewers.
Open-sourcing is when journalists open the news up to the public.  The public then has the opportunity to send in pictures and comments about what happened. Is this a reliable way to get more news?

Journalists and bloggers must have good judgement when it comes to open-sourcing.
In the link above, there is an article about open-sourcing; and it this article it states: Readers who care about issues should be given the opportunities to become directly involved in the process of gathering, processing, synthesizing and publicizing news.  Not only that, but the purpose of our journalism here is to challenge, to provoke, and to demand answers from entrenched powers, and as long as this is done in a productive and documentary manner, this is something that the public should be involved in as well.

However, by letting the public be apart of the involvement, journalists and bloggers need to use their skills and judgement to make sure the information they are getting from the public is accurate and true.  It is journalist's responsibility is to weed out the bad information and leave in the good.

That is the trouble with open-sourcing, it is not one-hundred percent reliable and that becomes trouble for journalists and bloggers. However, open-sourcing can be important because unlike the experimental crowd-sourcing. According to "Journalism Next," a book by Mark Briggs, open-sourcing is where a reporter is asking more specific questions that are asked to the public for more information.
Briggs says that, "Whether or not people respond, opening the process helps journalists increase their credibility and social capital."  This is basically saying that open-sourcing can be helpful when it comes to distributing accurate information.  It gives the freedom to the public to participate in the new way of journalism.

Policy 

If I was a part of a online news site, I would make sure there were a set policy when it comes to open-sourcing.  

There is a part of me that wouldn't want to include the public in the news stories that we cover.  However, the other part if me says, that it would get us more viewers and the public participation would keep them interested. 

If I had to choose, I would include open-sourcing on the site.  I would want to do that mainly to keep the viewers interested in the news we provide.

However, there would be a policy:

1. Not every story should be open to the public. To figure out which stories should and shouldn't be open to open-sourcing, should depend on the amount of information we already have on the event.  If one of our journalists has a good amount of information on the event, there is really no need to open the story to open-sourcing. 

2. If a story just doesn't seem to have the "oomph" we are looking for, that could be a reason to open to the public to see what they have to send in and say about it.

3. If the story includes the public I would want a few journalists to look the comments over and decide as a whole whether the information sent it is trustworthy enough to put in the story.  If there is any doubt, a journalist should find out more information, by seeing what other people wrote to compare.  If there is any contact information left, they should follow-up with that person.

4. If any information that is doubtful, then don't use it for the story.

Open-sourcing is not always necessary in a news story.  It would be nice to get the public involved in some of the news, but not everything should be open to the public. 

I would not use the information from the public to be the main source of a news story.  I don't think it should be used as the most reliable source, because if for some reason something in there is false and it wasn't caught by one of the journalists then some may start to believe that what we are reporting can't be reliable.

This is another video on open-sourcing by the Corbett Report:
This video talks about the history of journalism and how in the beginning of time journalism wasn't really a thing.  The only people to read and write were scribes who would write everything out long hand and the process was a lot longer.  This was not considered journalism, it isn't logical to write a newspaper out long hand. This video goes on through some of the history and how far journalism has come; from scribes, to town criers, to reporters, newspapers, and websites.  This video talks about what a journalist is and what they are thought to do. What some people see as a journalist now could be different from what others will see as a journalist 10-15 years down the road.