Blogging opened opportunities for career journalism

When James Kurisunkal began his blog Park Avenue Peerage 10 months ago, he never could have imagined where it would lead him. Kurinsunkal had always been interested in royalty and the socially elite. So, from his dorm room at the University of Illinois, he began a blog about the young socialites of New York City.

His subjects took notice. They began sending him photos and news to post. In May, Kurisunkal said that his site receives on average, 8,000 hits per day. Over the summer, he was offered an internship at New York magazine. Kurisunkal was only 18, a freshman in college.

There are several things that could be learned from Kurisunkal's experience. We discussed in class how public records can provide valuable info for stories. Although he was living in Illinois, Kurisunkal was able to access wedding and death announcements and certificates to begin his site and map together the lives of his subjects. His thorough research gained him credibility. He made a point to avoid salacious gossip and rumors which gained him the respect of his readers and his subjects.

One thing I questioned was his decision to not use his real name on the blog. When Andrew Keen gave the McBride Lecture earlier this month, he said that one major problem with the Internet is that people can hide. They can create fake pseudonyms to disguise who they really are. It's a huge problem because there's little credibilty and people don't take responsibility for what they post.

Obviously, in Kurisunkal's case, the pseudonym worked. I still feel it's something that should be avoided.

Black Friday

Yesterday, we had our tv on most of the afternoon. It served mostly as background noise while we caught up on homework and chores around the house. However, as I watched CNN, I got more and more annoyed. A majority of the coverage focused on the day after Thanksgiving shoppers. The day, referred to as Black Friday, is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

I understand if CNN reports one time that people are out by the thousands, probably millions, shopping. I understand if they want to tie in this year's slow economy. What I don't understand is how they think that whole segments on this can be considered newsworthy. My educated guess is that the same clip of shoppers running into the mall was shown five or six times over the course of the afternoon. Is this really the only thing that went on yesterday? Do I really care that Molly from New Hampshire had already gone home once to unload her car? No!

Maybe people would be more interested in the news if they focused more on issues like how many people won't have a meal this Christmas, (or how many will, thanks to food banks, etc.) than what stores are the most popular.

Bee Movie Portrays Men as Rulers of the Hive

In class we discussed Disney movies and how they portray traditional roles of males and females. The men are typically strong and take care of the women.

Nowhere is this image more prevelant than Dreamwork's new film, Bee Movie. In the film the main character, Barry, decides he doesn't want to work on the assembly line making honey like the rest of the bees.

Of course, as a recent article in the New York Times points out, this wouldn't even be a problem for Barry because, in the real world, male honey bees actually serve very few purposes.

Almost all the jobs within the hive are completed by female honey bees. The sole job of male honey bees is to fertilize the queen bee. As the article points out, they have large eyes to see the queen, and large antennae to smell her, but little other means of survival. Once a male bee has mated with a queen, it dies.

There is little use for the male honeybee in the hive. This explains why, in a hive population of 40,000 bees, approximately 200 are male. So, why then, does a male get the leading role in this film?

It all goes back to the roles of femininity and masculinity. The movie producers still believe that men are the ones who go out on new adventures. Women are supposed to stay behind and maintain the house, or the hive. Ultimately, the man is supposed to be the hero and rescue the colony.

This film is reinforcing the idea that women need men to defend them. It tells boys and girls to adapt to the stereotypical roles of breadwinner and houswife respectively. It seems surprising that in a movie such as this, where it it would be easy to make the main character female, the studio does not.

I'm disappointed that producers would go out of their ways to produce this inaccurate portrait of a bee colony. It would have been an excellent film to help empower girls and women. Instead, it's no different than any other children's film.

The Cosby Show brought black families into the media world

As we have been discussing in Media and Society, minorities have long been underrepresented in the mainstream media. Scholars have even used the term structuring absence to describe how the lack of images of minorities in the media results in white people being the natural identity category.

One show that really opened the doors to television for African Americans was The Cosby Show. When the show premiered in September of 1984, it gave Americans a new image of a black family.

The parents were successful as a lawyer and a doctor, and the family was thriving. They owned a fashionable home in New York City,one episode even focused around the expensive art that the family had used to decorate.

Accoding to the website for the museum of television, The Cosby Show was designed to address the history of negative portrayals of blacks on televison.

The show topped ratings charts for more than five years. It forced people to face the race issue in America. It made them rezlize that there were African-American families out there just like them.

I don't think that Cosby understood the impact he would have on people when his program first aired. He inspired other minorities to get involved in the media. Today, there are many programs that include minorities.

Even Grey's Anatomy can be used as an example. The Cheif of the entire surgical unit is african-american. So is the chief resident and one of the top surgeons.

It is programs like these that are pushing us towards equality among Americans. I think we are still a ways off, but the Cosby show was the program that made it acceptable to present blacks on television.

Television stations could be good for newspapers

In class we have discussed the drawbacks of media conglomerates, both on a national and on a local scale.

On a national scale, media companies that own several television stations, radio stations, newspapers and other types of media make it difficult for smaller companies to compete.

On a local scale, having a single company own the television station, the radio station and the newspaper limits the amount of information presented to the audience. Instead of sending out three reporters who find three different angles to a story, the company can send one to cover all three genres. This eliminates different viewpoints of the story. It would also be difficult for the audience to determine the accuracy and objectivity of the reporting, because there is nothing to compare it with.

This appears to be a problem that should be avoided. However, a recent op-ed article in the New York Times advised that local television stations could be the savior of regional newspapers.

Newspapers are becoming more of a novelty in America than a staple to daily life. As a result, newspaper subscription numbers are down. People are turning to online resources for news, and advertisers are turning from print media to the internet with their business.

In the article The Daily Show by Kevin J. Martin, Martin states that at least 300 daily papers have stopped publishing over the past 30 years.

He points to televion as a way to save newspapers. Martin argues that companies who own newspapers in the 20 largest cities should be permitted to purchase one tv or radio station within their community.

Martin goes on to argue that not allowing newspapers to own television stations could hurt the quality of news the paper is able to produce. A television station could bring in revenue to help run the newspaper and allow journalists to do more in-depth research, or allow the company to hire more journalists.

This appears to be a catch-22 in media today. It is a logical worry that having a sinle company own a lot of the local media market could result in non-objective reporting or incomplete stories. People could be less informed than if several companies owned different aspects of the media. However, without the revenue and cooperation of the media outlets working together, one company may not have enough resources to produce a quality product.

Working moms a problem for Colbert

In class we discussed how first wave feminism brought women into the work place. Men were off fighting in World War II and women were needed to take their roles in the factories.

Women have been working outside the home ever since. Still, there are people who believe that a mother's sole job should be to care for her children.

Take Steven Colbert for instance. He recently announced that he was running for president in the state of South Carolina. His manifesto, I am America (and So Can You!), outlines much of his campaign platform. In it he discusses his view of working moms. He said on a recent episode of Meet the Press that a woman should spend every second of her time thinking of her children. He said in his book that working outside the home is as bad as bringing coconut arsenic brownies to the school bakesale.

While Colbert's book is probably as serious as his campaign, the fact that he would even think to write such a thing shows that those beliefs do still exist. His book reached number one on last week's New York Times Best Seller List. A facebook group titled 1,000,000 strong for Steven Colbert recently surpassed a 1,400,000 person membership.

I doubt that these people really believe that mothers working outside the home is equivalent to feeding children drug-laced desserts,but Colbert's writing could certainly reinforce the negative image of working moms.

Surely his writing is not to be taken literally. If it is, he has alienated a large part of the voting American public.

Citizen Reporters

I recently watched an interview that Matt Drudge creator of the infamous Drudge Report had with the National Press Club. As we are showing through this class project, blogs are everywhere. There are millions and millions of blogs.

People use blogs to keep in touch with family and friends. Some people use them as journals. Now, it's becoming increasingly popular for people to use their blogs as news sites.

As Matt Drudge showed, regular citizens can become journalists. Drudge was working in the CBS Gift Shop when his father bought him his first computer. He soon discovered how to post information on the information, and as they say, the rest is history.

Now Drudge's sight gets more than six million hits a month. He has scooped the mainstream media on several major stories, such as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the Microsoft and NBC merger.

Yet, the National Press Club seemed to despise Drudge. They accused him of suspect methods. They said he spread gossip as much as he reported news. He doesn't do in depth research or check his facts.

Drudge, however, says that he's just one of a growing number of citizen reporters.
People who take on the powers that be. They are the watchdogs of the watchdogs. Now that anyone is able to post information on the internet, people don't have to go through mainstream media to get something seen by the world. They can simply upload it to YouTube or MySpace.

It eliminates the need for editors which eliminates the filtering of news. According to Drudge, it enables the public to have access to a more accurate complete view of what's really happening.

Just Another Reason!!

It's one thing to know personally that your U.S. Representative sucks, but it's a whole different level when he portrays his incompetency to the world YET AGAIN.
Just another reason why I'm SO proud to be from the Fifth District.