my perception of journalism

the topic for this week is "Discuss how the New Media Intensive has changed your perception of journalism in general and your work as a journalist in the future". Firstly, I need to work out what my perception of journalism was before the intensive, then I can see how it has changed. I came ot Rhodes to study journalism basically because I could write at school and I was the school's newspaper editor. I never thought I would fall in love with radio like I did. And I am so glad I went into radio. My perception of journalism hasn't changed much between the intensive and the rest of my four years doing journ, but rather these four years have dramatically changed my perception from before I came here. I decided to do new media because I have this uneasiness towards the latest technology, and still believe that it is out to conspire against me. And the best way to deal with your fears is to grab it by the horns I guess. I have now come to discover that journalism is all about striking a balance between giving people not only want they want to hear and read, but what they need to. And then presenting it in such a way that they will consume the information they thought they did not need to know. New Media has taught me that it is all about presentation. It doesn't matter how god your work is, if its presentation is not appealing, no one is going to bother to read it or listen to it.
As for me being a journalist in the future, radio stations are slowly but surely merging with other media, specifically the online stuff. Every radio station has a website, and I reckon if I want people all over the world to hear my work, this is a perfect avenue to go down. I know it sounds corny, but knowledge is power and if I know how to make my work more accessible, it leaves me no excuses. I have realised that radio can be very visual and using a website is the perfect way to integrate visual aspects with audio aspects.
I have had great fun learning new skills and its been great to feel like a bit of a techno nerd:)

As a journalist in the 21st century I want to be able to work on creating my pieces (be they audio or written) whenever and wherever I need to. Because stories don't come to you, you have to go to them. If I could use any new media technology to make my job easier it would probably be a streaming audio function (I am not sure if that is the right term for what I mean).
Basically, I would like to be able to make my package (wherever I am) and simply by being connected to the internet I can upload this package onto my site or any other site that might have commissioned me to produce it, and people can listen to it immediately. I'm not quite sure if people already do this, but if they do, I want in on it as well. In the 21st century everything is about who got there first. Timeliness and speed are imperatives in a competitive environment like the journalism world. But I also believe a rushed job is a bad job, so I don't want to lose out on valuable interviewing and researching time just because I have to race back to the office. With this function, whatever it may be called I don't need to rush as much. Also I want to be able to cross live to a website from wherever I am, not only upload packages. I hope whoever reads this understands what I am trying to say. As someone who technology conspires against, I am not too good with these terms and things, so please be patient with me. So yes, I would like a new media product that can afford me the flexibility of working anywhere in the world and still getting my info, packages and stories to wherever they need to be in a matter of minutes. What a wonderful world that would be...

Wikipedia - The encyclopaedia of the future?

hmmm... difficult one. I love using Wikipedia, it always explains terms in a way I can understand. Sometimes the information is a little over my head but generally I find the site very useful. The problem is however, a lack of authority. The information sounds very authoritative but the nature of wiki is that anyone can add or edit any explanation, so essentially what you are seeing is a collection of opinions and interpretations, and you have very little scope to find out where these opinions and interpretations come from. So how do you know if what you are reading is true or not?
On the other hand however, just because a book has an author, does not mean that whatever is said in that book is anything more than opinion and interpretation. So what makes a book more authoritative than a blog or something? The founder of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales says on the site that they have a policy to include all points of view, and the contributors must remain as neutral as possible. This is all good and well on paper but in practice it is a bit different. A person's definition of something may clash severly with someone else's definition without menaing to have encited different points of view.
However, it's almost a fact that many people use the internet for their research for projects and essays. I know that goole and Wikipedia are my first ports of call when starting a project. So these websites have a raher large responsibility to provide accurate and fair information.
I seems like a catch 22 situation: everyone can have their say but what who has the final say???

"Citizen Journalism"

On wikipedia "citizen journalism" is kind of like public journalism. Now that's something I can talk about. Basically it is about involving the public or the citizens in many or every aspect of the newsgathering process, and really letting them decide what they want to hear. I had the opportunity to be part of a public journalism exercise this year while working on a women's show called Women on the Move on Radio Grahamstown earlier in the year. Our class of 5 girls expected this to be easy to identify with since we were all women and this was a show about women, for women. However, we were in for a rude awakening. Radio Grahamstown's target audience was very different to us. We were now producing radio for women struggling with many different issues to us. This called for some in depth research. We conducted an all round interview with ordinary people in the street and discovered that there was so much we didn't know. The pertinent issues that arose such as unemployment and starting your own business, violence against women and general health and HIV issues were not exactly what we expected, especially not the way the women felt about these issues. The main issue here is that we would have been providing a product no one wanted if we did not do this research. Another aspect of this show was that it was a phone in show, so most of the show's content was meant to be taken up by phonecalls. Granted that didn't happen too successfully, but it was very important to us to find out exactly what the women of Grahamstown East wanted to listen to, and what an amazing experience it was to just get one phonecall from someone looking for advice from one of the guests. it sounds cliched, but just knowing that someone was listening was enough reward.
Radio Grahamstown is a community radio station and the people that work there are part of the community. The enthusiasm showed by our host Nwabisa and our guests was inspiring, and for the first time I felt part of real radio (if you can call it that).
Brett Davidson from Idasa wrote a paper called "Mapping the Radio KC Community" and in it he describes how the people from Radio KC in Cape Town got actively involved in understanding and discovering part of their audience that they never really knew they reached. It is one of the best examples of public journalism I have read about. I do agree that public journalism is a difficult thing to implement, but where possible it can create such valuable journalism that outweighs the struggles of implementing it.