Presentation 4, Week 6 - Online Journalism

Online journalism - a great source for alternative news. But instead of praising its concept, let's talk about the negative aspects of online journalism as it's much more interesting.

One method of partaking in online journalism is to own a blog and share your views on the events taking place that is reported on the news (or not). Since everyone can own a blog, this means everyone can express their opinions, and this form of journalism by regular Joes and Janes is called Citizen Journalism.

Citizen Journalism is all fine and dandy if not for the fact that it creates an "overwhelming freedom", as one of the presenters of this topic so interestingly put it. What this means is that on the internet, anyone can say anything and still remain anonymous. So this churns out good journalism, and bad journalism and netizens need to understand what it means to really be an online journalist.

Just because you have a camera and internet access, that does not mean whatever you put up online can be considered as news. The purpose of reporting is to inform the public information of value, not trivial information such as what you ate for breakfast or what you wore to school today. While it may interest close friends and family, it will not interest the general public.

And then there is the existence of search engines. You cannot live without search engines. Try it, I dare you. Try to find information on the exact 17 causes of teeth skewing and discolouration* without the aid of a search engine. But with such a tool, all sort of information is available to you with just a few clicks.

So what about search engines and why is it bad? Firstly, majority of netizens will click on the link of the first search result without double-checking if that page will be relevant to your cause. So if that's normal behaviour for people, who's to say that journalists themselves won't be practicing such acts? I'm sure journalists use the internet quite a fair bit to research on their news piece and if they don't practice diligence while using search engines, credibility of journalism will plummet into the drain and down to the earth's core.

In conclusion, don't be too trusting of alternative media alright?

*I kid. There are no 17 causes of teeth skewing and discolouration. ... Or are there?

Presentation 3, Week 5 - Globalisation vs Localisation

This week's topic was presented by my group, and it discusses the dangers of globalisation and how it affects the journalism industry negatively. Globalisation in itself is a good thing - it advances many aspects of the world for the better in terms of economy, technology, culture and communication. Globalisation generally means the process of interconnecting different parts of the world and as Wallerstein (1974, 1979, 1980) stated, "the process of making world economy dominated by capitalist models". But is that a good thing really, especially the rather alarming term "dominated by capitalist models"?

We know that there are a handful of transnational corporations (TNCs) having a hold of smaller companies, like for example within the journalism context, Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network holds a terrifying amount of power over several broadcasting stations and newspapers. This basically results in a convergence and standardisation of news as all content that are being disseminated have to go through the approval of Rupert Murdoch's ideal and agenda, and content are recycled between sister companies. This also creates credibility issues and lack of diverse opinions.

So to combat this standardisation of news, consumers then turn to alternative media, namely going online for their source of information.But with TNCs getting more powerful as theyform mergers and alliances with smaller companies, it's only a matter of time before they get a hand on an online content provider and there goes your "alternative" media.

Solutions for this problem hasn't been all too forthcoming, but our given reading materials state that the best anyone can do is for individual countries and states to enforce a law that will allow broadcasting stations a level of autonomy for example. But again, responses for this solution has been rather underwhelming. If no one wants to take the initiative to enforce local laws against letting TNCs complete control, then globalisation will eventually be seen as an act of evil instead of progress.