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Reading Reaction #13
Remember when as a kid the minute bad weather hit there goes Mom and Dad running to grab the radio (and batteries) in case the electricity went out? You knew that as the weather got worse you could not count on the television to keep you informed. Even today to stay informed of what is going on around you when you’re without electricity don’t even think about searching on the Internet as you may have done in the past. While the Internet can keep us informed in good times of our local news and weather in bad times how much can it help if there’s no juice (electricity) going to it? So the point I’m getting at is even though as Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 206) have noted there is a “decline in local radio news”, just think what would we as listeners do if we could no longer count on the radio to keep us informed and nothing else was available? You know very well this could all happen with the advent and popularity of the Internet. I remember growing up in a small town in Oklahoma and once bad weather hit, especially where we lived in Tornado Alley and tornadoes started popping up around us, into the closet we would go with what else but a RADIO. Like I said we took a radio not a laptop with us. What was the use of feverously trying to get on the Weather Channel to keep up with the changing weather once again without electricity?
When you’re in your car and have the radio on and I don’t mean XM or Sirius Radio, once in awhile you’ll hear the local news and weather coming on. The one thing that you’ll notice which I found as odd is who is announcing the news broadcast. Not an announcer that works for the radio station itself, but a pre-recorded newscast from one of the local TV stations. Now talk about convergence!! Radio and television coming together to provide you with your everyday news- well at least someone’s doing it for now at least. How long will that last with once again the Internet taking over everything in its path? While it seems that we as “news consumers” are becoming apathetic according to Grant and Wilkinson, I believe that as long as there are sites online that can provide us with news, politics, entertainment, weather, etc., that there will always be some form of consumer to utilize it.
While convergence in itself sounds like a prime opportunity to get the best news possible out to the public just think of the downtime in trying to work together. Each entity has its own language and method of doing things which would then have to be taught to all involved. Just as Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 222) have remarked upon, each group whether newspaper or television each “viewed news with a distinct vocabulary of precedents”. I wonder what would be the downtime in teaching each specific group the ins and outs of the other media fields? Would they ever be able to function as a whole when each part might be lacking the knowledge needed to succeed? Just think what it would be like to go your whole career studying law in hopes of becoming a lawyer and then to have the rug pulled out from under you. You’re needed but just not only for your skills as a lawyer, now you have to learn how to become a doctor or this merger will never work. You literally would have to learn new skills and new methods of doing your job but in order to keep this form of convergence working you would have to keep up to date your knowledge of the law. Luckily, like those working for the Media Center in Tampa at least each of the three main types of media have a common goal they are trying to fulfill. Besides that, each of the varying forms of media do have some commonality on which they can build on. If only they could rise above the distrust they have for each other and learn to work together as one entity would that not benefit everyone involved in creating a harmonious workplace in which all could thrive? Just think of present day politics and how a Democrat named Obama has to reside over a mainly Republican congress. If they have to learn to work together for the universal good of the nation then how hard can it be to give media convergence the old college try and create a smooth transition we would appreciate. If Obama has to learn how to maintain peace in the White House just how hard can it be for media to just try and get along? Can you hear me now?
Works Cited
Grant, A.E., & Wilkinson, J.S. (2009). Understanding media convergence: the state of the field. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reading Reaction #12
The coming together of anything under one roof may seem like a good idea at times but… even with common shared interests is it really a good idea? Sure, you can go to your local Walmart Supercenter and notice that within this huge store you will most likely find a bank, a hair salon and even a nail salon around the corner as well as some fast food place to eat. While those that have the energy to enter into a Walmart for their everyday needs would find that extremely helpful in having everything right within reach this concept just does not work out for every type of merger. Whereas for me I have to need quite a few items before I will step foot into a billion square foot store to do my shopping. I do believe that if I had other business to attend to while I was there that I am all for having as many varieties of miscellaneous stores as there is room for them. Have you noticed lately how everyone tries to offer you a package deal on anything from your wireless, home and DSL service to even what satellite provider you want for your television programming? Is it really for your convenience or theirs? They try to make it sound like a profitable idea for the consumer by packaging multiple items together under one retailer like AT&T. Enroll in their services and have only one bill to pay and of course there will be a discount. But, on the other hand when that huge bill comes along and for some reason you can’t pay it, what do you think happens? You as a consumer end up getting disconnected from all three services at the same time. That can be said for numerous packaged goods we are apt to purchase together in a bundle due to conveniences sake. In other words, convenience and trying to combine things together for the benefit of all can sometimes lead to the downfall of everything you were trying to achieve in the first place.
Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 185) use as an example of difficulties within cross-media mergers the failure between AOL Time Warner and AT&T Broadband. The point is that even with good intentions not everything is meant to work together. The authors claim that often these failures are due to “philosophical and management differences” but many things could of led to the failed union. Putting two different entities together to try and streamline things in hopes of reaping a profit from the merger might look like the right thing to do on paper but may best be left alone in real life. As we all know oil and water do not mix! Try as we might there is no getting the two to go together. Even in our everyday lives, we are exposed to gadgets that are supposed to make our lives easier by letting us do multiple things at the same time. Multitasking is supposed to make our existence on this earth somewhat stress-free but in fact, it only leaves us with giving less than 100% of our full attention to anything at all. Can we really iron, talk on the phone and cook at the same time? Maybe so but at what cost?
While convergence especially in the media field is supposed to be the coming together of different groups into a united front we have to remember that each separate unit already has their own way of doing things. While the project in the Tampa News Center to create a togetherness of multiple forms of media did appear to be a productive option it looks as if there were many critics to this new style of broadcasting. According to Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 189) critics had voiced concerns that a “convergent newsroom would damage the editorial independence of news operations and reduce the amount of original content”. Meeting together at a central desk in the multimedia office does not necessarily lend itself to positive results. I wonder if there have been other attempts at this type of convergence and if so if they have fared any better? How could you tell if there was any type of profit coming from this type of venture and besides that, how would you know if the rise in viewership was due to the merging of the different groups or just something that was bound to happen anyway? Unfortunately, knowing that answer might be hard to figure out and possibly not worth the cost of building such an expensive news center as was done in Tampa. I even wonder if in today’s markets if there’s a chance that this news center would even last especially with the rise of the online news market. At least with the coming together of like minds interested in making news both profitable and enhanced at providing varied forms of news who knows what direction this venture will go to. I do feel sorry for the workers there as I am sure the workload and the stresses of combining different opinions as well as different methods of producing news has got to take its toll on everyone.
Works Cited
Grant, A.E., & Wilkinson, J.S. (2009). Understanding media convergence: the state of the field. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reader Response #11
What has this world come to? New Media shows up and everything changes! Before you could sit down and read a newspaper or watch the local news and you would be happy and well versed in what was going on in the world. Now it seems in order to get and keep the attention of today’s youth everything has to be customized just to keep their interest. When did all these changes begin to take over our lives? Besides just providing news that everyone used to think was enough now it seems that the industry has gone the way of multimedia providing only what it deems relevant to its “younger” viewing audience. Even with all these changes, today’s youth still have strayed away from reading newspapers and thus newspaper readership is down. Is this the end of the printed newspaper and is convergence and multimedia the only way youth will read the news? According to Edgar Huang (2009, p. 105), the tremendous lack of young readers to newspapers has been going on for decades as well as the downward spiral in television and radio.
I’m surprised with the losses in the television industry but I do know that TiVo has eradicated the need to look at commercials if we don’t choose to. Plus besides being able to zoom thru commercials we don’t even have to look at our favorite shows live, we can wait till the next week to watch them. I wonder what this does to the television stations providing the shows as the whole majority of their viewers may not even be in front of their televisions when their shows are on. I hate to admit this but sometimes I accidentally think TiVo is available everywhere but in a strange way. I hear a song come on and want to rewind it but alas no TiVo. I have heard though that a new innovation like TiVo is now available on certain new models of cars. Besides that, something odd happened to me the other day when I was watching a cop go by chasing a car trying to give them a ticket. I so wanted to see whom they were chasing that I pointed to the cop like I had a remote in my hand and tried to rewind the scene as if it was being TiVo’d. Needless to say I felt mighty stupid and embarrassed to say the least. Now it seems that I may not be the only one that has done such things. In reading the article by Krissy Clark (2009), I had a good laugh at her clicking on a house she saw in the distance as if it were a hyperlink trying to get more information about the area itself. While she and I were both embarrassed at what we had done, with the advent of Smartphones and GPS tracking devices our delirium now seems to be something which in the foretellable future may in fact be just a normal, everyday thing to do. Maybe I am just a 40 yr old ahead of my time, for once.
What has caused radio to go the way of newspapers and television? The only thing I can think of is Sirius radio or XM Satelite radio taking over where basic radio once dominated. I don’t have either one but would love to experience it as long as I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for it otherwise I’ll stick with generic radio for what it’s worth. I doubt think that will happen anytime soon. Well back to the lonely newspaper sitting in the newspaper rack waiting and begging for someone to put their quarters in to purchase. If today’s youth didn’t have parents that read the newspaper then what chance would it be that someone in their 20s would go and grab one to read on their own? Not likely to happen and in fact as Huang (2009) notes there is “plenty of evidence that many young people loathe reading newspapers” (p. 106). . I pray that we never lose the printed newspaper as it’s so great in the morning to grab the newspaper outside and read it from front to back. I guess I’m just from the old school or maybe I’m just old or maybe I just understand the importance of print media. Whatever the case, what in fact constitutes good journalism? As Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 164) have noted, what is the main reason news organizations converge in the first place, because of the bottom line or because it is just good journalism? I guess that’s a question we’ll just have to wait and see what happens over time.
It is no surprise that New Media is taking over and doing it in a big way. Have you noticed the decline of CD/DVD sales and the increase in pirating? The sale of CD’s and DVD’s used to be what filmmakers and pop stars counted on to increase their sales. Now who needs to buy a $12.00 CD of Thriller when you can go online and download to your MP3 player or your blank CD the whole album or just the particular songs that you really favor for much, much less that you would pay for it at Target. Also if you do get stuck with a CD of let’s say Whitesnake well then just sell it on Ebay and at least then you can recoup some of your cost. Just imagine going without New Media for hours on end and seeing what you can and cannot live without. I recently underwent this experiment and found out that it wasn’t as hard as I thought. Maybe that’s because I’m in the 40s generation and rather enjoy being away from all the texting, Twittering, YouTubing and New Media that seems to be overwhelming today’s youth. I in fact do not text or glue myself to Facebook and rather enjoy it. If it were not for being enrolled in a New Media class I would never have delved into Twitter or WordPress or even set up my own blog. I actually had no interest in investing in any of these media sites. So as my “going without media” experiment has ended I find that my life is just fine without all the extra hoopla.
Works Cited
Grant, A.E., & Wilkinson, J.S. (2009). Understanding media convergence: the state of the field. New York: Oxford University Press.
Huang, E. (2009). The Causes of Youths’ Low News Consumption and Strategies for Making Youths Happy News Consumers. [Article]. Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15(1), 105-122. doi: 10.1177/1354856508097021
Journalism on the Map: A Case for Location-Aware Storytelling by Krissy Clark
We as consumers always want to know where the things we purchase come from. Who would feel comfortable buying something off the street such as a watch or a purse and not desiring to know if it is an original, who manufactured it or where it came from? While in this instance we are purely speaking about a physical object, is not the same to be said for that which is for viewing pleasure, namely news whether online or in print? Though we cannot physically examine news backwards and forwards and inspect its many parts, we as readers want to know that it is credible and comes from a source we can trust. Just waiting in line at the grocery store to buy groceries you are bombarded with all the fluff magazines and rags that line the shelves. They are all hoping they can persuade you to purchase them with their ludicrous articles such as “Sarah Palin Gives Birth to Aliens” and whatnot. Is there something innate within us that lets us know what is believable and what is preposterous? What if the same article concerning Sarah Palin was on the front cover of Time Magazine, would we tend to believe it more just because we feel that Time is a reputable source? I find it somewhat odd that because a magazine or newspaper has produced oodles and oodles of outrageous stories that not one thing they have published is credible. I mean how can a publisher come up with so many out of this world stories and us as readers not think that maybe there is a shred of truth to at least part of what we read?
Besides paying for what we want to read fluff or not at the check stand, now it seems that just the act of going online to stay current with news may now begin costing us. When we get online using our favorite search engines such as Google, Yahoo or any other number of search sites to peruse national news we may in fact be going to a site that actually wants us to pay for what we are about to read. Ridiculous is it not? With all the news sources out there offering us free up to the minute news on any range of subjects who wants to go and pay for something they can get for nothing. Think of how many readers would be turned off by finding out that what they used to get for free now has a price tag assigned to it. No doubt, with that kind of news site you would be losing the interaction you once had with the public. As Martin Moore (2010) surmises, cutting yourself off from the web community leads to disabling “the vast majority of people from recommending, linking, commenting, quoting, and discussing” while severing your chances from reaching a larger prospective audience. Think about the lost chances to promote your news web site if no one provides links to it. You can feel free to charge viewers to view your web site as Rupert Murdoch did but I am sure you can expect no one will provide a link to reach it through their blog or anywhere else. I always assumed that links would draw an audience away from your site to a competitor’s site but as Amy Gahran (2010) remarks putting links in your stories “adds structure and context within the story format” and provides context that search engines can even use. Well here we are back at discussing search engines. New ones seem to be popping up everywhere promoting their speed and reliability. I have even noticed how Google has implemented their search engine to begin to provide results as soon as you begin typing. Now that is definitely a search engine trying to be faster than the competition by any means.
Readers of online blogs and social networking sites can observe that even sites such as Facebook seem to engage in their own form of “news”. As Nathan Crick (2009) mentions, these sites group together people with the same ideas and who are like minded where they can speak their own language and post their interests against each other (p. 484). In other words, they are forming their own community pods where they can relax and be among their peers. This seems a lot like the cliques that we all encountered in high school but hopefully not so restrictive that others cannot be allowed into the mix. Now getting back to news but the kind that is available for all readers regardless of what social group they belong to, namely online news. I wonder what power Rupert Murdoch has over his news organization that no one not even his media manager had the power to stop his decision on forcing readers to pay for his news services. Where were the other team players that should have been integrated in the decision to change how they would provide news? According to Grant and Wilkinson (2009, p. 135), media managers are supposed to be the ones helping to shape the convergence newsroom. They are the ones that should lead others towards change and development which is vital to maintaining yourself in a current market. As convergence is the way New Media is headed, what kind of costly mistake has Murdoch done to his followers and will this be something other organizations will follow or will it strictly lead to Murdoch’s downfall? I guess that is a question that time will only answer.
Works Cited
Crick, N. (2009). The Search for a Purveyor of News: The Dewey/Lippmann Debate in an Internet Age. [Article]. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(5), 480-497. doi: 10.1080/15295030903325321
Graham, P. (2000). Hypercapitalism: a political economy of informational idealism. [Article]. New Media & Society, 2(2), 131.
Grant, A.E., & Wilkinson, J.S. (2009). Understanding media convergence: The state of the field. New York: Oxford University Press
Media Shift: How Metadata Can Eliminate the Need for Pay Walls by Martin Moore
Structure News: Make Useful Connections to Build Your News Business by Amy Gahran
In our readings for this week, we observed how printed newspapers are not exactly disappearing as many of us might have thought. In my opinion, I thought that with New Media approaching us from all angles the printed newspaper would go by way of online news sources. Steen Steensen gives us another view on the longevity of the printed newspaper. He claims that they were supposed to have faded out due to technology encroaching but in fact did not. This was possibly due to journalism not being revolutionized with new media. Things seemed to be moving at a much slower pace than was expected so online journalism has not progressed as was expected. Why has this new influx of technology taken so long to hit online newsrooms and what could be done to change this course? This might be due to a lack of immediacy within the newsroom. There seems to be more articles written that are not on a time line than are. News is ever evolving so special reports on currently breaking news is more focused on keeping that information up to date than let’s say travel etc.
What Steensen is telling us in “What’s Stopping Them?” is that online journalism is being explored much less than the idea of online “news” journalism. He remarks that a “substantive grounded theory of innovation in online newspapers is comprised of five factors: newsroom autonomy, newsroom work culture, the role of management, the relevance of new technology and innovative individuals” (2009, p. 821). Innovation is defined as a new idea or method or the process of inventing something new. Innovation is very important for many different reasons and is embraced by many diverse disciplines. Slappendel remarks that there are three different perspectives to innovation which are an individualist perspective, structuralist perspective and an interactive process perspective (Steensen, 2009, p. 823). It appears as though the third perspective of an interactive process seems to be the strongest. While the others deal with the individual being the stronghold for initiating innovation, the second emphasizes structure in an organization as the deciding factor in innovation. Is a determining factor in why online newsrooms are behind due to the fact that what technology is available is too difficult to understand or perhaps not even available? That seems like such a contrast in words. Those professionals working in the journalism field should always be aware and able to use any innovations available to them. They need to stay up to date as we as a viewing and reading audience need to have our news delivered to us in a timely manner. Who else in any field deserves to provide its’ audience up to the minute reporting than a news station? Besides that, who would we trust more with our news reporting that someone specifically trained to do so?
Grant and Wilkinson (2009) remark about a study done in 2001 in which it was found that 80 percent of newsrooms had a defensive culture and that this culture resisted change (p. 118). It seems that at the time it was nearly impossible to put together print and broadcast journalists even in the same room to collaborate on topics. With all the pressure for news reporters to be the first ones in with a breaking story, no wonder there are feuds amongst anyone out there promoting the news. You can even see this in movies such as Superman. Clark Kent was pushed by his boss to be the first one out there with pictures or a story concerning the hero. The editor wanted Kent to use his “friendship” with Superman to gain access to photos that no one else would be able to come across. The newspaper was adamant about coming up with first what no one else had. Even today, when you are watching the local news you can hear the newscasters informing us that they have breaking news and that their station got the news first. In order to win in the Journalism field you have to get your reports in first because being second does not usually matter in the long run.
While culture is a huge aspect of print and broadcast newsrooms, it seems that the strongest barrier between these two is the cultural barrier (Grant & Wilkinson, 2009, p. 119). There is also a bias that needs to be diminished in order to provide peaceful relations. Allport actually came up with three ways in which bias can be diminished. These ways are that groups must be equal in both practice and perceptions, the groups need to be engaged in cooperative activities rather than competitive ones and lastly, if group collaboration is to be at an optimum level there must be support of institutional authorities present (Grant & Wilkinson, 2009, p. 122). While we may never find news reporters working with each other to reach common ground, we can hope that over time technology will bring those forces together for the betterment of its readers.
Works Cited
Grant, A.E., & Wilkinson, J.S. (2009). Understanding media convergence: the state of the field. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.
Steensen, S. (2009). What’s stopping them? [Article]. Journalism Studies, 10(6), 821-836. doi: 10.1080/14616700902975087
