My take on Week 4 readings

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — So, here I am trying to figure out how to sit down on an log and I sit in the fire. Ouch, that hurt, I think?

That's how well my foray into Second Life was. Like Jennifer Serwach said on the Discussion Board, I wasn't that impressed with the interface or the virtual world itself — although after I did sit down some stranger walked up to me and asked me in Spanish if I wanted to be his friend (Not exactly like Facebook, eh?).

What I found more fascinating is how these people are writing and producing their own stories about this virtual world. Can't make it as reporter in the real world? Maybe you can make it in Second Life, a place with its own economy and problems just like the other world we share, although MSM, such as Reuters, has already cutback its own bureau in SL (just like the RW).

After reading the CJR article, I decided to do a little research about these SL publications, the Alphaville Herald and the Second Life Herald. It turns out they are one in the same with the motto “Always Fairly Unbalanced,” which fairly describes the content on the site, which ranges all over the place. There are these short profiles about a featured female avatar that includes pictures with and without clothes (which is easily offensive to some and why I didn't make the site assigned reading). But then — and here's the most intriguing part — there are news stories about SL, everything from gambling and lifestyle trends to what's going in the RW related to SL, for instance a class action lawsuit against the SL’s creators. From that perspective, it is certainly not what you see most places, but it looks like journalism to me.

Then, there is the CNN site, which allows users to post their own stories. It makes me half-jokingly wonder, considering the current economy in journalism these days, if that's our future.

Of course, it's hard figuring out if you can really trust these avatars because you don't know who they truly are, although like some point made someone made either in the readings or on the DB, don't we have our own masks in the RW?

Freep Emmys

The first point I want to make about both of these reports is that the one about Arthea Franklin is I went to college with the reporter, Kelley L. Carter. I make this point not to name-drop, but to show that despite all the economic woe, there are journalists who are surviving and thriving. Kelley, who now works for USA Today, started off as a print reporter, but she's clearly evolving to the new world.

Journalistically, I think we're apt to see more reports like “40 Years of Respect” rather than the three-year long project on the foster home. Again, the economic conditions will make it more difficult for those longer term pieces, although it tells a story that you'll find nowhere else, journalism that why I got into the biz back in the day. But just like our text talks about this week, can a news organization afford to invest such resources if only a small number of people actually view the material. If it didn't win an Emmy, how many would actually access this report and what does that say about our society?

Text reading

The concepts that stood out most to me in this chapter were the ones on plagiarism, depth (re: last comment on Emmys), and accuracy of Web sources.

It's easy to copy but it's easy to credit and we should always do so, especially when we create our own Web news sites later this semester. But as the text outlines you just can't copy the entire thing without permission. The trick is being able to quickly find out if its OK. Many news organizations, for the moment, encourage links and embeds of video, and everything that the government produces is fair game, but beyond that, especially photos, we all need to be real careful. It's not just a legal thing (copyright), either. It's about doing what's ethical, which, IMO, people will eventually have a stronger demand for in journalism after the current economics shake out.

Lastly, on Web sources. It's easy to want to believe Wikipedia, and it certainly can be helpful as a potential guide to information, but we don't know the necessarily the source of that information and it and many Web sources need to be verfied. I know from my recent experience editing the opinion page for The Flint Journal. Often, people would write letters to the editor, citing stuff on the Web. While it was time consuming, I could find how what they were citing was wrong. Still, I think that added value to our pages to fact check what we would publish and put on the Internet. I believe not all newspapers view their letters to the editor the same way. Scary thought, IMO.