My computer has not been cooperating with my watching of Al Jazeera until now. I am actually glad about this, however, because the topic came up at Tuesday night's Murrow Symposium.
Bob Schieffer was a pretty cool guy, I thought, but when asked why he thought that no cable stations were allowed to show Al Jazeera, he replied that there probably was just no interest from news comsumers.
I think the lack of interest, if there really is a lack, which I doubt, stems from the public not knowing about Al Jazeera.
While I was watching Al Jazeera, I was able to get all the top news of the world, not just the top news of this country or the area that I live in. If we watch local news on tv we are much more likely to see a student who has never missed a day of school featured on the Spokane station than the protest that is going on in Thailand to try to get the Prime Minister to step down.
I think that the Internet is an effective way to reach a high amount of U.S. audiences because people can generally find what they want to watch online. However, there are technological problems so I, like the student at the Murrow Symposium, wonder if this program will someday be available on cable packages.
I see no reason why this program should not be broadcast. It is simply a worldwide view of the news. I saw nothing that was offensive or harmful to the United States, except for informing residents that they are not the only important thing in the world.
The difference of this news program is they truly seem to have no main area that they are focusing on. They are actually trying to look at the news throughout the entire world. I even saw a feature on a motorized cart, but it is something that affects a huge amount of people in the area it is used, and is therefore interesting to me.
The code of ethics, which I think Murrow would have approved of, are in my opinion being followed. The stories I saw were straightforward and honest, with no opinion or bias thrown in.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
V irtual journalism summit
Unfortunately, for most of the summit I was down the hall selling cookies and cupcakes to raise money for SPJ, but I was able to catch the roundtable discussion in the afternoon.
This topic is an interesting one. I had no idea as to the enormity of the journalism that is going on online, and in particular, in Second Life and Club Penguin.
I was most amazed as to what Lane Merrifield was saying about Club Penguin, however. He said that there are 10s of thousands of blogs about this world, and most of them are about kids. And for their in-world newspaper, the receive 30,000 submissions a week! This number is almost unfathomable for me.
I also really liked the idea of iReport that Lila King was talking about. Colaborative journalism is an interesting idea. Her "sandbox of professional journalism" was a fascinating one and I agree that it makes stories more interesting if you can get the complete view.
I am a little sketchy about using things like SecondLife for business meetings and practices like that. I know it gives people a chance to talk to each other even if they are in many different countries, but Philip Rosedale was talking about people concerned with keeping their board meetings private. If they want it private, why would they conduct it over the internet, particularly in a virtual world like SecondLife?
This topic is an interesting one. I had no idea as to the enormity of the journalism that is going on online, and in particular, in Second Life and Club Penguin.
I was most amazed as to what Lane Merrifield was saying about Club Penguin, however. He said that there are 10s of thousands of blogs about this world, and most of them are about kids. And for their in-world newspaper, the receive 30,000 submissions a week! This number is almost unfathomable for me.
I also really liked the idea of iReport that Lila King was talking about. Colaborative journalism is an interesting idea. Her "sandbox of professional journalism" was a fascinating one and I agree that it makes stories more interesting if you can get the complete view.
I am a little sketchy about using things like SecondLife for business meetings and practices like that. I know it gives people a chance to talk to each other even if they are in many different countries, but Philip Rosedale was talking about people concerned with keeping their board meetings private. If they want it private, why would they conduct it over the internet, particularly in a virtual world like SecondLife?
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