In our final lecture Steve Molks from
http://molkstvtalk.com/ came to talk to us. MolksTVTalk is a blog about Australian television, the motto of which is "Challenging opinions of today's TV."
Steve's real actual last name is Molkington, but he thought Molks would be easier to remember. He started out as an IT professional and ended up becoming an entertainment blogger because he loved TV and wanted to do something different. Blogging isn't his sole job though because he hasn't got to the stage where he can earn a living simply from that.
It was interesting hearing what Steve had to say about branding. He said that you can control your brand and make it work for you. We can start doing that now through our blogs and twitter accounts. If we present ourselves well it will help us get a job in the future. We have the opportunity to write what we want and using our brand can make us more employable. We can also make contacts now who will be helpful for our careers.
Blogging is becoming more important too, though it is still young. It allows you to connect with certain online subcultures in an international market. Your area of interest could be fashion or tennis or pop music and if you can make it so people will come to your blog to know more about that area of interest, it is a very good thing. If you work on you writing for your area of interest then you will develop your skills and improve as a writer. Getting lots of views on your blog is not an overnight thing either, it takes time to build publicity.
He spoke about Mia Freedman as an example of a successful blogger. She had worked in magazines and on television before she started http://www.mamamia.com.au/ in 2007. She now employs twenty people and receives 900,000 unique views a month. Mamamia covers everything "from pop culture, politics, body image, food, motherhood, feminism to fashion and celebrity."
Twitter is also something that can help you. For example, you can directly connect with and question a public figure or celebrity. They may not reply, but they could choose to, and this is a new possibility because ordinary people didn't used to have that kind of access. It's especially useful for someone like Steve, as an entertainment blogger.
This was a conversational and informative lecture which had the added interest of being delivered by someone who is a blogger themselves. It was great to hear his opinions, perspectives and advice on forms of new media, such as blogging and twitter. I'll have to keep what he said about branding and creating the right content in mind because it will definitely be useful in future as a way of showing capability to possible employers.
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As this was the last lecture, I will also reflect on this course. I took this course because I thought it would be interesting, but it wasn't my main area of study. However, it turned out to be my favourite course this semester and I have decided to have one of my majors in this area. It has been an interesting, informative and useful course, which I'm certainly glad I took.
"(Investigative journalism is)... what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is just advertising."
Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Times and The Daily Mail
The topic of this lecture was investigative journalism. This is a journalist deeply investigates a topic, usually to expose something and usually involving power, corruption, money or sex.
Investigative journalism needs to be:
- Intelligent - needs to be well thought out
- Informed - need to know all the facts
- Intuitive - rely on your gut, is it dangerous?
- Inside - need trust of your sources
- Invest - time, money and health can be affected
It's less risky if you are involved with a media outlet for the investigative piece because they can offer you more protection, funding, lawyers etc.
"An investigative journalist is ... to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available." Hugh de Burgh, 2000, British media theorist
Investigative journalism is important for keeping an eye on those in power. It can also create social change, a historical example of this being W.T. Stead's exposure of the child trafficking in the 1800s, which resulted in the age of consent being raised to sixteen in the UK and Commonwealth. The Watergate Scandal is of course another very famous example of investigative journalism: http://watergate.info/
"Newspapers clearly have a function beyond mere reporting and recording - a function of probing behind the straight news, or interpreting and explaining and sometimes of exposing ... The process lives by disclosure."Sir Theodore Bray, editor-in-chief of the Courier Mail (1965)
"Isn't all journalism meant to involve questioning investigation of facts and opinions presented to us?"
Ross Coulthart, Australian investigative journalist
We were told to always check every fact, don't assume anything, and to expect whistleblowers to be paranoid and act a bit crazily. You can't get all your information second hand and stay sitting behind you desk the whole time.
Types of investigation interaction:
- Interviews
- Observations
- Documents
- Briefings
- Leaks
- Trespass? (Old-fashioned and your boss won't approve)
- Theft
Nowadays with online news there is less money, meaning less journalists and less time. Therefore there is also less investigative journalism because of how much you have to invest into it. However, The Age does have a good investigative section, see here:
I was interested in, but not very knowledgeable about investigative journalism before this lecture so I really enjoyed it. Since I like finding things out it sounds like an appealing area of journalism, as long as it doesn't get dangerous. It's a shame that online news threatens investigative journalism, because it's a very valuable thing. Just look at some of the past examples mentioned above and imagine if those things hadn't been exposed.
Lecture Ten was about agenda setting. The idea of agenda setting basically means that the media outlets don't just report the news, they also shape it - or at least our idea of it.
It began with us being shown a clip of Charlie Brooker's "How to Report News". I have actually posted this on my blog a while ago because I thought it was both accurate and pretty funny. I'll post it again here:
"Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as more important than others. Simply put, the more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to people."
(Coleman, McCombs, Shaw, Weaver, 2008)
Harold Lasswell first wrote about agenda setting in the 1920s. In 1922 Walter Lippman also wrote about how the mass media creates pictures of events in our heads. Just think about important events and what you picture them as. You may not has been there yourself, but the media has given you an idea of what it was like. For example, think of the September 11 attacks in America - when mentioned, most people (myself included) will see footage or photos of the towers that were shown on the news.
Lippman argued that instead of critically thinking, people will often rely on the images the media gives them to formulate their judgements. Thus, the media can engaged in agenda setting almost as a form of propaganda.
Compare the difference in the way the O.J. Simpson case was treated in these two different magazines below:
Elite media outlets can set the issues on the news agenda for other outlets, for example, after the ABC ran their story about live cattle exports it became a major story in all outlets as well as a point of national debate. Think about how much influence this has, because the media informs the public and sets the national agenda. This in turn effects which issues policy-makers will decide to pursue.
"Agenda setting is not always the diabolical plan by journalists to control the minds of the public but an 'inadvertent by-product of the necessity to focus' the news." (McCombs 2004)
The media can influence public opinion in regards to various issues. Using the example below, we can see the different portrayals of Indigenous people. There is the idyllic traditional lifestyle, the achievements of young Indigenous people in modern Australia and drug/alcohol/violence issues.
"The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about."
On the other hand, often important issues like AIDS are not given enough attention anymore and instead there will be more focus on a piece of celebrity news. There can also be a bandwagon effect with media, where things such as Kony 2012 are picked up by major media outlets because their popularity is noticed.
There's a lot of focus on keeping up with the new twenty-four hour news cycle and may mean less deep analysis of news stories. It needs to be new, instant, snappy, simple and attention-grabbing.
This lecture helped me to gain a deeper understanding of something which I notice in daily life through my exposure to different media outlets. Sometimes I will read about a story in one news source and see an entirely different take on it in another news source. This comes down to the agenda setting of the media outlets, which are targeted at different audiences and have varying focuses or biases. It was interesting to explore this concept further in this lecture.
"News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as 'newsworthiness' ..."
A. Boyd 1994, (broadcast journalism).
Lecture Nine was about news values, which is basically about how newsworthy something is. Many events happen every day with tonnes of potential stories, but they don't all end up in the news. This has a lot to do with news values, which is essentially concerned with the question: "Are people going to be interested in it and is it going to stand the test of time?"
News values differ between different news services, countries and cultures. However some news values apply universally. News values refer to how much exposure a news service gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by the audience.
"News values are one of the most opaque structures of meaning of modern society ... Journalists speak of "the news" as if the events select themselves ... yet of the millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny proportion ever become visible as "potential news stories": and of this proportion, only a small fraction are actually produced as the day's news..."
(Stuart Hall, 1973 (ex Lamble))
These seem accurate to me because there is always tragedy and negativity in the news especially. The more news values a story has, the more likely it is to become actual news. Whereas if a story has few or no news values it is unlikely that is will end up as news.
Another take on new values was Golding and Elliot's 1979 list: - Drama - Visual attractiveness - Entertainment - Importance - Proximity - Size - Negativity - Brevity - Recency (Exclusives, scoops) - Elites - Personalities
When my lecturer was working in the newsroom he said the motto was, "If it bleeds, it leads." This means that if there is any involved violence, war, car accidents, celebrity deaths or other related tragedies it will usually be the top story. Local news services such as Ten or Nine News also have the motto, "If it's local, it leads". This is because they are emphasising their niches and because people are usually interested in things close to and affecting themselves.
We were told that the news values of an organisation aren't usually set down in writing and explained for, but you just get a sense of them from being in the newsroom. This is expressed in the quote below:
"A sense of news values" is the first quality of editors - they are the "human sieves of the torrent of news. This is even more important than an ability to write or their command of language.
('The College of Osmosis', Evans, 2000)
There were other examples of news values lists but just chose to include the most all-encompassing ones, otherwise there would be too many.
We learnt about the tensions between these areas: journalism and the commercialisation of media and social life; between journalism and public relations; and between journalism's ideals and its reality.
Churnalism was something was talked about - churnalism being the when PR stories are made into news stories. This can be by taking large chunk of text from the original press release, as well as supplied photographs or footage. It is lazy journalism, but it's more common now because there are fewer journalists and so they are looking for a way to get stories when pressed for time.
Another idea discussed in this lecture was new balance of power between the media and the audience. We, the audience, now have access to new media (e.g. blogging, twitter) and can have more influence and voice our opinions. News values are also not static, they shift over time. That explains why there is no detailed and definitive list that is absolutely universal. On slow news days some things might also get prominence that usually would not. Governments often put out unpopular pieces of information on big news days hoping they'll go unnoticed, whereas they often release things they want to receive a lot of press on Sundays. This is because there are less people in the office on Sundays who need plenty of stories for Monday.
This was a great lecture for understanding why events become news. I hadn't been aware that there were specific factors mapped out that made something newsworthy, so I think this prompted me to give it more thought.
