JenJen

Getting In Focus

2009-12-09T02:43:00.000-08:00

As part of Brunel University’s Art criticism in the Digital Age Study Day, our MA journalism class was divided up to report on the day in different forms of media. Some students were commenting on the day via twitter, others took vox pops whilst some wrote articles reporting on the day. I usually choose to play it safe and rarely venture into new mediums. I see writing a report as the easiest and least troubling option. Having spent the past two months exploring new media and the various platforms available to journalist in the digital age I thought I should try something different.

Photography has always been something that interests me, particularly portrait photographs and images of real people, in natural situations capturing spontaneous reactions. I therefore decided that volunteering to take photographs of the afternoons events would be an intriguing venture.

The day got off to a shaky start as Danny (the morning photographer) and I, were unable to borrow one of the university cameras and had to use a camera Danny had bought from home. The lecture format of the event didn’t lend itself well to particularly interesting or original photography. The hall was large and looked sparsely populated despite the good turn out and the various pieces of technical equipment which littered the room, along with people constantly milling in and out, meant that shots could be obscured and cluttered.

At the end of the day I took the camera to the

computer suite to upload my images, only to find that half of my photographs had disappeared and the others appeared decidedly nondescript. Pushed for time and unsure how to use any editing program I merely cut and pasted my bland images into word and accompanied them with short captions. I was unable to get more than one image in each document and so had to submit 20 words documents, each containing a photograph I was less than pleased with.

The following week I was introduced to the very basic photo editing program Picknic. I was still disappointed with the photos I had produced and was keen to see if I could improve them with this program. It is free for users to upload and simply edit photographs and even though the applications are basic, the small changes made a vast improvement to my images.

There is an auto fix option in Picknic but i wanted to add to

photographs myself and didn’t feel that this option

changed the image dramatically. The main thing about the photographs which disappointed me was the dull colo

urs. The beige background appeared to merge with the skin tones of the people and the overall affect was very boring. On Picknic I was able to alter the colours by changing

the temperature and saturation to create a much warmer image.

The images also appeared quite flat but I was able

to use an advance setting on the exposure application to adjust the highlights and shadows in the image to give sharper definition and depth. The adjustments are made simple through

the manual sliders which allow you to drag the cursor the precise setting you want.

As the setting for the arts criticism day was quite cluttered a lot of my photographs were very busy and the eye was not drawn to the main focal point of the image. I used Picknic to crop the images, erasing unnecessary background

and centring the eye more on the part of the photograph I wanted to capture most.

These very simple editing tools allowed me to produce set of photos which although far from perfect I was much more pleased with. As a tool for serious journalists Picknic is obviously basic, although with the applications available on the paid-for service I am sure it would possible to greatly enhance and alter images. As a journalist should produce photographs which are truthful, Picnick’s simple tools would allow you to sharpen and crop images to make them more eye-catching and focused without enhancing them beyond a truthful representation. It would be a very useful tool for a journalist working under pressure and with limited photographic

material, to create a competent image to accompany an article.

Spoon Feeding

2009-12-09T02:39:00.000-08:00

As part of the generation of the digital age the use of the internet should be second nature. School kids of the noughties take lessons overseen by teachers not scribbling on a chalkboard but flicking through a power point display with interactive monitors in front of every child.

I on the other hand seem to be firmly stuck in the technological past. I like newspapers and a good old fashioned pen and paper. Unfortunately as a trainee journalist this is something that is going to have to change.

Even the basic of searching for news on the internet can pose problems for a technophobe like me. I type my desired item into Google and an array of related links appears. Apparently simple, but on further investigation these links do not relate to what I want. The news is out of date, the articles relate to Uxbridge in Massachusetts not Uxbridge in Middlesex.

As a journalist, news need to be up-to-the-minute and relevant and in a concise, readable format. I need to be able to scan articles relating to my local area as well as keeping up to date on national and international issues.

As I rule I begin the day by scanning the BBC news website and the Guardian online whilst simultaneously watching BBC breakfast and trying to avoid logging in to Facebook. These outlets provide me with an overview of national and international news. However the articles I am given on the websites home page are designed for a wide audience and are dictated by what the news agency chooses as most important. I may have to navigate around the website to find the information I really want.

It is possible to define my search by using manual search engines, which allow you to make advanced news searches specific to locations and time periods. However, this can be a time a consuming process and it would be much more beneficial to a time restricted journalist to have a variety of set search stipulations for different areas which could be directed to one forum.

Google reader is a platform which allows publishers of online content to instantly alert surfers when they have published new content. This is done through subscription to RSS feeds. When I first heard this my face fell. Abbreviations in relation to computers usually stand for an incomprehensible group of words which will never mean anything or be used in any sensible way by me. I was delighted to hear the RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Ignoring the Syndication part, Really Simple was something I could relate to.

The RSS feed is available by clicking the RSS button in the web address bar, which can be copied and pasted into the subscription box in Google reader. Feeds from these websites will then be updated instantaneously in Google reader.

Although not all websites have RSS I have managed to create a page of personally relevant feeds from local and national sources of interest.

It is also very easy to direct RSS feeds to other platform, such I have done with blogger. It is a good way to share relevant sites and to driect readers to sites of shared interest or further information. This allows you to make your work broader and more interactive

For a journalist a personalised RSS feed platform can be invaluable as a time saving and organising resource. However it is never going to provide you with exclusive news or opinion and debate in the way of less regulated and more widely contributed to resources such as Twitter. However carefully selected sources will be much more reliable.

The format of the page is quite unappealing to the eye but this is outweighed by the dense amount of information that the page contains and the ease with which you can scan and select articles from the extensive list.

Despite this I have found myself using the old websites as sources of news and neglecting to use Google reader as frequently.

Until now...with the delegation of beats in different areas of Hillingdon the previously unused news feed for West Drayton became my first source of information. The news was unsurprisingly sparse and I am not banking that Santa’s Christmas canal ride will be the story to launch our journalism careers, however the RSS feed provided us with lead which may have taken much trawling of net or even a visit to West Drayton to find.

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet...

2009-12-09T02:37:00.000-08:00

Before September of this year my impression of Twitter was that it was a format for egotistic celebrities to keep obsessive fans updated about their menial activities. A scarily invasive and unnecessary expansion of our already celebrity saturated culture. So I was understandably horrified when I was told in my first week of a supposedly serious journalism course that we would be having a lesson devoted to Twitter and that we should all get ourselves signed up straight away. My protest was shamefully short lived and by the second week of term I was a fully signed up tweeter, albeit with no tweets and an embarrassingly small number of followers.

Twitter had “helpfully” given me twenty random people to follow, one of which was Lily Allen. It is impossible not have heard something about the online ranting of Allen; self pitying blogs and up to the minute tweets of her movements. I was surprised to see when I logged on to delete Lily that her final tweet, posted at 2:04 am on Sep 28th read: ‘I am a neo-luddite, goodbye.’ With a quick goggle search I found that a neo-luddite now means somebody who is opposed to technological progress or change. Did this mean that twitter was changing? It obviously didn’t suit Lilly Allen anymore and this made me all the more intrigued.

Although my own tweets were limited I began to watch the site more closely and attempted to build up a list of contacts who could tell me something other than which club they were going to that night. The timing of my introduction to Twitter could not have been better. Within weeks of my first tentative tweets Twitter rose to prominence with the Trafigura story. The social networking site managed to leapfrog an injunction imposed on the conventional media. It concerned the reporting of information regarding a parliamentary question relating to Trafigura’s alleged dumping of waste on the Ivory Coast. As the Guardian was locked in a legal battle against the super injunction Carter-Ruck were attempting to impose on Trafigura’s behalf, thousands of tweeters were busy piecing together the evidence to reveal the nature of the question which Traifgura were so keen to keep hidden.

There are no sanctions which can be placed on the discussions on Twitter and no limit to the amount of people who can read and add to the information placed on the forum. In one sense this is exciting and ground breaking; a way of everybody being a journalist. Twitter certainly seems to be much less about talking about one self, but discussing, sparking debate and getting answers.

However, there is a frightening side to this. The formation of a mob mentality, especially if the information they are acting upon is not entirely correct and given that you can only tweet 140 characters at a time the likelihood of misinterpretation is high. The theory of crowd sourcing suggests that a crowd can be intelligent even if many of individuals who make it up are not. But I am dubious as whether this is always true. In a recent multiplatform lesson a tweet came up announcing the Lockerbie bomber Al-Megrahi was dead. This was immediately followed by a tweet from our class reiterating this information. The claim turned out to utterly unfounded. It is obvious that in a sense posting incorrect information means that the issue will debated and hopefully the right answer given but that is assuming that somebody on Twitter has their facts correct.

Imagine the possible consequences if Twitter had been at its most utilised during the time when a totally innocent Paediatrician was mistaken as a paedophile and an all out witch hunt ensued. It is true that somebody of slightly more intelligence on Twitter may have pointed out the obvious mistake but how many more of the ignorant would have joined the baying mob?

Despite my reservations I have found myself with the urge to tweet, especially when something of interest in the news makes me angry or excited. However given my limited number of followers debate did not initially get very far off the ground ground. I would often log on to the site to check the trending topics and to read the informative and often humorous tweets of popular tweeters Stephen Fry and Richard Bacon, but I was still very much an observer rather than a participant.

By looking into trending topics more I found that by adding a hash tag (#) before a key word I would be able to interact with other people who wanted to discuss the same topic as me. Others would be alerted to it as it is possible to view page of tweetes related soley to this trending topic. Obviously it depends on whether other people are discussing the issues I wish to but it is simple to search a topic by typing # and the topic into the Twitter search box or to being a trending topic myself. This was a way in which I could engage with Twitter despite my limited number of followers. It means that my tweets no longer feel redundant and that I can use the forum as a way of gauging some sense of opinon on subjects of interest. Using this and the @ prefix, which allows you to send direct messages to people, I can begin to build up a list of useful followers who may provide an excellent journalistic resource for me in the furture.

The link at the side of this blog shows my twitter page and features tweets from those I am following.