GBJ multimedia blogs

Nicole has been using her blog to draw some sketches and play with mind maps. Fundamentally, play is about creativity and imagining things. So a lot of what our mind does when we are not concentrating is play with new ways of looking at things. We make connections that we cannot seem to make when we are trying too hard. When we let the mind loose, creative things happen. Nicole’s sketches and ramblings are here, here and here. 

My first boss at a daily newspaper knew how to unleash creativity in headlines. He would play around with some of the key words in a story and just let it rip. So to write a headline for a story about the history of a coal mine (a potentially boring topic), he would play with words associated with songs or poems or just facts:  ”coal” “lump” “shaft” “pick” “collapse” “49er” “Clementine” “carbon” “soot”. He would write 10 or 15 different playful headlines, many of them awful, until he came up with something clever and compelling. He came up with this: “Coal mine owners got the gold while workers got the shaft”. 

Karen summarized a report on “News in a Networked World” from Pew. Among the most interesting of the 12 observations about how news is changing were the views of the audience. Users’ perceptions of news media bias are growing, the audience is getting more fragmented along partisan and ideological lines and people are losing faith in news organizations. The implications for us? What do you think? Personally, I think these trends emphasize the need for professional journalists to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack by their ethical standards and the transparency of their news gathering processes. In other words, just be straightforward with readers about how information was gathered. If you use an anonymous source or if a reporter goes undercover, explain why you did it and be frank with readers about the drawbacks of these practices.

Blogging isn’t just about writing. Elva shows us the potential of using multimedia in a blog by posting her slideshow of Tibet photos along with her narration. Somehow the slideshow seemed more impressive when displayed on the blog than when it was submitted as a homework assignment. I looked at it in the context of a published work for all the world to see. 

Young has some reflections on our attachment to social networks and devices rather than people. Students will text someone who is across the room rather than engaging in a face-to-face conversation. What does that mean? she asks. “Balance between realistic world and virtual world is necessary for me,” she concludes. She also was angered by a Reuters report on Bo Xilai and his wife that relied on anonymous sources. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, named names in its report and was thus more credible. That’s precisely the point, isn’t it?

Tini Tran, the AP foreign correspondent who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, impressed Daniel with her passion for her work.

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The senior editor in the features department of Xinhua News Agency discourages reporters from using digital recorders during interviews, Elva reports. The editor, Ms. Huang, believes that reporters will fall into the trap of merely taking dictation and not try to rearrange the information from the interview in an interesting way.

Personally I think it is a good idea for the reporter to rely on taking notes because that in itself helps filter out a lot of unnecessary information and makes the reporter focus on what is being said. 

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Cameron’s post on the power of radio, and the power of the podcast “Giant Pool of Money” in particular, describes a discovery: radio can cover a topic that might normally put off the average person.

“But these guys presented the story with simple vocabulary, a cohesive them, vivid characters, and a presentation style that made the information digestible to the everyday man.”

He reminds us that we always need to be open for discovery from unexpected places.

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It was with great empathy that I read Cameron’s thoughts about how the web may be destroying the originality of writers, given its emphasis on linking and readability by robots. As a print journalist by training and experience, I can understand how appalling it is to consider that much of what determines the audience for an article is not a clever headline but a literal headline that an algorithm can understand. Metaphors don’t work on the web.

I see the same things, but come to a different conclusion. The linking and collaborative aspect of online journalism has the potential to enrich a writer’s work and to bring it to a new, wider audience. 

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