Week Five. Topic One.
I believe that a large part of the web is just "hear'say", and this is no different when it comes to the news. We do not know who is publishing the news, it could be anyone and these people are using a broad range of sources, from the reliable to the not so. I personally look at the BBC News online, as well as the online version of The Sun and even PerezHilton.com for celebrity news. "News" on the web, I believe can be anything, because no one moderates who posts the news or what is said. We choose to believe what we want. I take most of the news with a pinch of salt.
We flick through and find our own informaiton and news, learning from a mixture of text, audio and video, as well as archives which many online news sites have. We choose what we learn and how we learn it. We can publish out own news and information, we "copy&paste" from other sources-other websites, newspapers and the news we hear on the tv and radio, meaning we are the "researchers" of the news ourselves, meaning there are "new kinds of journalists" online.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that we are becoming a new kind of journalist, however, in my experience it is not only us the consumers who are doing it. What if it's the journalists who are "cutting and pasting" the news that we read?
ReplyDeleteFor example, recently I was asked to write some news pieces by a friend for a Gambling web-site she works on. Rather than writing the news from press releases or from an "original" source, I was told to search Google News for relevant pieces and then re-word them for the web-site.
In this way, me as the "journalist" was editing the news from another second hand source, so by the time someone on the Gambling web-site read it it would have been through 3 or 4 pairs of hands, who knows to what extent it would resemble the "real" news by this point!
In this case is being your own journalist as it were necessarily a positive thing?
I definitely agree with what you've both said about being our own journalists. I think the hypertext of the internet ensures this....we can read the news in one place and then in another and it links to pictures and to the paper's message board etc etc and 'do your own research' as you said.
ReplyDeleteIt's really easy therefore to lose track of what info is from where and what was 'fact' from a reliable source vs speculation from somewhere else...it all becomes a bit blurred.