I will post three times in December. You have until the end of the month (12/31) to comment on the posts.
1. A pretty interesting human interest piece from the NYTimes. Not only is this a unique story, but it's well written and digs into the subject quite well. What do you think of this piece? While we have the Wildcats of the Issue in the sports section, how might The Voice work in more single person profile pieces to spice up its pages? And I'm talking about more than a review. What kinds of things are MA students doing outside the classroom, on-campus that merit a little spotlight?
2. With the recent trouble in Mumbai, this article from CNN discusses the role of Twitter in the fiasco. There were some moments when Twitter was the ultimate news source, and other times when it seems to fail. First, what is Twitter and how does it function? Second, how do you see Twitter playing a role in the future of news gathering and reporting? Is it a good tool with the potential for awesomeness? Or, like many other social networking tools, is it something that should be discredited for its lack of veracity?
5 comments:
I really liked this story about K.K. and his breakdancing kids and their creative new school. As far as connecting it to MA, here are my thoughts:
The MY MA section offers somewhat of a form of a human interest piece that investigates one person. However, because MY MA pieces are written by the person themselves, they lack the insight that can only be achieved by an outsider. With that said, I think that we could create a scenario for someone to do an in-depth report/interview about someone and some specific thing they do that makes them so unique. Here's my one caveat: I don't think this is a good place to interview/explore a kid who does an MA sports or community service, because there are a lot of people out there. We need to find that one person who does something SO unique that it is story worthy. With that said, following someone around to get a good story sounds like a fun idea and something that would go over very well with the MA student body and greater community (yes, that means faculty too)
About tweeting...
The attacks in Bombay were beyond scary for me since my entire family lives in the city... I found out later that one of my uncles had dinner at the Taj literally minutes before the terrorists burst in. I was terrified not knowing for so long what was going on in the city and with my family. As it was happening on Wednesday, I sat on my couch for hours switching back and forth between various news stations as each played the same footage over and over. Real updates were somewhat rare and it felt to me that there had to be more information than what I was seeing. Twitter was infinitely more useful in getting first hand information as the attacks were happening. For example, while news sources on TV focused on the American and British hostages, Twitter was already reporting that terrorists were targeting Israelis as well. It was not for another thirty hours or so that CNN disclosed that information.
The New York Times was also asking for first hand accounts from ordinary readers on their "Lede" portion of the website. There, a few people posted cynical comments about the fact that anyone could provide true or false information about the situation. While this is indeed an important consideration when we evaluate the reliability of our news sources, it was incredibly comforting to have unfiltered information available both on Twitter and nytimes.com. Plus, we have to consider how much we trust the "real" media. After all, news stations are the ones trying to make a profit off the information they give us, while ordinary citizens on Twitter are just trying to spread facts.
I loved the break-dancing story; it was at once heart breaking and warming. I think there is a definitely a place in the Voice for more in-depth student (or perhaps even faculty/staff?) profiles. But, as Josh said, it would have to be someone extraordinary doing something extraordinary that the whole community didn't already know about. I think there are a few people out there who have some pretty amazing accomplishments, it is just that whoever and whatever we choose will say a lot about our newspaper and its staff. So, we would have to be careful. I think last class we were discussing a more magazine-esque design where we could follow someone or something throughout a day. Hello! This type of story and that type of design are a match made in heaven!
Tweeting
At least right now, Twitter is a reassuring, yet not totally reliable news source. Fact-checking is obviously non-existent, and false information on this microblog spreads just as easily as gossip. The central problem with Twitter as a news source isn’t the people who post unverified, incorrect news, but rather the people who retweet (re-post) and re-retweet and re-re-retweet the false news. The very nature of microblogging leaves the door wide open for those that are motivated to spread rumors. But, information from Twitter comes to its users fast and raw, and even though some its news can get “messy” at times, it is an invaluable constant stream of unfiltered information that appears in real-time. As the world moves toward this kind of reporting, Twitter, which is almost appears to be a merging of Facebook and a news-RSS feed, could very well be the next major force in the world of breaking news.
Possibly, in the future, there could be some sort of “rating system” (a la Ebay) on Twitter that tweeters could use to “rank” users (much like how people can rate on Ebay to evaluate the legitimacy of sellers). That way, the untruthful tweeters could eventually be weeded out, and people would know which tweeters to follow and which to ignore, eventually creating a trustworthy network of citizen reporters. In addition, as technology progresses, and SMS and smartphone-tweeting become ubiquitous, Twitter could evolve out of its “social networking” phase, and become a news-net wire for the entire world—making everybody a reporter.
Tiras Lin
I also really enjoyed the story about K.K. and his new life of teaching breakdancing in Cambodia. I thought that it was so appealing because it showed such an uplifting a success story. It took a person that began with very little in his life and grew to transform his passion into a very successful job despite all of his tribulations. However, it also ended on a note of continuation, stating the problems that are still faced by both K.K. and the United States policies. I thought that overall it shed a very negative light on the US and brought to light a lot of the hypocritical events and decisions that take place.
I agree with Kareem and Josh that there is definitely a place for an article such as this in the Voice so long as the subject is a truly unique member of the community. I think that it would also be great if the piece was able to tie in a larger issue of the MA community, as the K.K. article did, so as to appeal to a larger audience. However, that would require a lot of searching, but I think there are people in the MA community who do things worthy of article like this.
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