THE END IS HERE!

Alas, the very last blog (Huzzah!)

My assignment is finally back on track. ACON ever got back to me, so I decided to contact other people. I couldn't wait for them any longer without stressing about the deadline.

This decision has also meant that I have to slightly change the direction of my proposal.
My new main interviewee is a blogger who is living with AIDS and shares his experience on the Internet. He has shared many experiences with me and I feel like it will give a more personal side of the portrayal of HIV/AIDS in the media.

Thinking back on our previous studies in our class, I am going to incorporate the idea of social media sharing as a means of connecting with audiences in this feature. The blogger has been told by many of his audience that his blog is one of few in Australia that truly portray living with HIV/AIDS. I also want to incorporate the idea of social media being a platform for journalists to contact sources, as this was the way that I was able to contact my final interviewee.

I still need to look into some old articles from the uni, but my main idea is to show the difference in media portrayal and a great example of this is the 1987 ad for AIDS awareness. This ad really encompasses the difference in how AIDS was portrayed in the media at the very beginning of AIDS, compared to what we are exposed to now.

Another example shows various news clippings that speak about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how the disease is mostly amongst homosexuals and discrimination against them.

These days, the media is much more supportive and proactive in trying to bring awareness to the disease. Similarly, the discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS has decreased and is discouraged through laws and regulations. This is a more recent AIDS campaign issue showing celebrities on board to bring awareness.

Source 

I feel a lot better about the assignment now, having had my main interview. Looking forward to getting it all finished. Good luck guys!

Secrecy and Those Who Tell

“Governments, the citizenry and secrecy make for an uncomfortable triumvirate at times” (Dreyfus and Hrafnsson)

I feel like Wikileaks is one of those things that everyone has HEARD about, but they don’t actually KNOW anything about it. It’s just that thing that happened with that bloke that’s in that embassy.

Even I wasn’t 100% sure where it all started and how it began and I don’t know about you, but I found the textbook a bit confusing.  So I did some digging. Good ol’ Google.

Wikileaks was launched in 2006 and since has released more than 25,000 secret details about the US and their relationship with other countries, detailed logs about civilian deaths from the Iraq and Afgan wars amongst thousands of other documents.

The information is leaked to the not-for-profit organisation by anyone who has access and information. They don’t leave the government in charge because it is seen that “they cannot fairly be both the keeper of the secrets and also a truly independent judge of wheter the public release of those secrets would be in the best interest of the citizens” (Dreyfus and Hrafnsson). This is where us journalists step in.

The Wikileaks project is run by The Sunshine Press who are dedicated to the idea of free press. The “cleaning and declassifying” (Dreyfus and Hrafnsson)of documents is then crowd sourced to journalists who are “public advocates….[who] sought to make as much information public as possible, unlike the government”.

Still confused? It takes a while to work around the antics of Julian Assange (the headliner of the organisation that’s currently stealing all the thunder).

What you do need to know is there is a lot of controversy. Some people think that Wikileaks has gone too far and released too much information. Others believe it is in the best interest of the public to know what the government and other organisations like religious organisations, banks and large companies are doing.

Here are what The Telegraph deem as the top 10 Wikileaksstories, some that has rocked nations.

YouTube have HEAPS of interesting videos on Wikileaks, each with a bit more information to share light on what they do. 

Similarly, a Wikileaks search on the Internet will return a bagillion hits.

News.com had a great breakdown and easy to understand concept of it all.

Do you agree with the concept of Wikileaks? I think I'm on board. I think the way we are going, it will become an important tool for truth and advocacy, granted they remain vigilant and check their facts.  

Major Work Woes

So it's getting down to the nitty, gritty, end of the year madness we are all used to. Got a million assignments piling up? I hear ya.
I was proactive in starting this assignment. I contacted my major people during the holidays and have been meeting with them regularly since. Then disaster struck, in the form of silence. By that I mean, the once completely willing, easily contactable and very keen contacts had disappeared off the face of the Earth.
'Fantastic,' I thought to myself. This is just what I need. Being 100% busy pretty much all the time, I am going to take what I have got off them, cut my losses and begin the search for more contacts.
I started with the Google, as all good students do. In my head I had the idea of contacting some larger media names to see if I could hit the jackpot and get one of them to agree to talk to me. I have some names and will keep my fingers crossed that they get back me. I have also found a civilian blogger, who journals about his AIDS, local and national issues. He is very passionate and provided his email on the blog so I have contacted him to try and get his thoughts on my topic.
I should probably give you the low down of said topic. I want to explore the way AIDS/HIV has been presented in the media since 1981 (when the first official AIDS case was reported). I incorporated my disappeared contacts, ACON, as they are a local organisation who support people living with HIV/AIDS and are celebrating their 25 year history in 2013. I have contacted the library and it has been confirmed that there is such a place that holds years of old records, dating back to the 1900s, so I plan to head there early next week to check it out and try and find some old documents/newspaper articles that will really exemplify the difference in today's media from then.
I already have two interviews and they turned out pretty well. One gives a really emotional and subjective account that I have used to begin my feature, which I will share here.

 _______________

"It is important for you to know more about AIDS because there is probably no other illness of our time that has been so dominated by both ignorance and misinformation" (Royal Newcastle Hospital Newsletter, October 1985)

Imagine you had contracted a disease that not only you didn't understand, but your friends, family, community and even doctors, didn't understand. You begin to fall ill and are sicker each day. At hospital, the nurses and doctors don't want you in their ward because they are afraid of you. Afraid to administer medicines, afraid to touch you and afraid to even breath in the air around you. People don't want to visit and your family are worried, but they too are scared.

Imagine being so sick, with a disease that was so stigmatised with negativity, that you began to realise you may die alone.

This was very close to being reality for a Hunter man in the early 1980s, who was found by his friends in a hospital room alone, in a dirty bed, food outside the door, in the dark, thirsty and drained, because he was being ignored by staff due to his HIV/AIDS status.

Thankfully, a lot has changed since the 1980s.

 _______________

I have also researched the current facts on HIV/AIDS and will include some interesting points, such as the fact that the infection rate has INCREASED since 2011. 

I want to incorporate as many older documents and quotes (such as the one to start the feature) because I feel it gives some authenticity and it also adds shock factor, as times have really changed since the 80s. 

If you have any ideas, or thoughts on contacts, I would love some feedback guys. Extra brains always help!

It's not all bad, I swear.

We have spent all day bashing public relations or bashing journalism. There is such a blur now that the relationship and content between the two industries is almost the same.

But is it all bad?

Yes, there are way too many public relations practitioners who are doing the dirty. Whether it be by lying, or simply with holding the truth, lots of journalists are getting caught out using information from PR people that isn’t right. Journalists are also making their own mistakes – mainly by not checking their work.

We all know the horror stories.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel!

I’ve looked into different campaigns before that have been spun by PR people, covered by journalists and the world actually becomes a BETTER place!

One of these topics is something very close to my heart, blood donation. It may be deemed one of those 'softer' issues, but one in three Australians will need donated blood. Shockingly only one in 30 regularly donate (doesn't that sound PR-ish). So it's an important issue that will more than likely affect you one day. 

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service has a cunning and effective PR team.

You only have to take one look at their images and copy to realise they know how to work it. 

Like little Ivy. Now, despite how much you hate needles how could you say no?

Journalists then have their job to do. They get out the 'human interest stories' about blood donation, to let people in on the almost constant crisis state of blood levels.

Here are 2 different stories on blood donation, just from my local paper, The Maitland Mercury.

Students in A-Positive mood

Wanted: 180 blood donations

If you type blood donation into their search, pages of it come up! 5 pages to be exact. I would bet my dwindling savings account that a lot of these stories were generated from PR releases. 

Is it overkill? Maybe, but we have finally found a PR/journalist relationship that is doing some good!

Here is some other stuff on the journalist/PR relationship-

This isn’t the most upbeat, vibrant and catchy video you will ever watch but it is a good discussion on public relations and journalism working together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysBGbIG6NtE

This is not really relevant to the post but still interesting -  http://ojs.lincoln.ac.uk/owps/article/view/3

Data? In journalism? Surely not!

 

I chose journalism as a profession and area of study for a number of reasons, one of those being that I was terrible at maths. Really bad, to the point where I can’t help my 14-year-old tutee with her maths homework. Journalism was meant to be all about words. Like many times before on my wondrous learning adventure we call a comms degree, I was proved wrong. But I did laugh when I opened the first chapter for this reading and read Tanner’s first two lines;

“Let’s face it, journalists tend to disavow any love of mathematics. Their stock-in-trade – so they claim – is words, not statistics”.

I really hadn’t noticed the importance of data in journalism until this topic was bought up. Then it was all I could see. I couldn’t believe I had discredited maths as being unimportant to journalism. While many stories are not about the data on its own, adding figures and report statistics to your story brings you above the rest in this day and age of ‘declining journalism’.

I can use these simple ones, mean, the median, percentage points, differences, opinion polls and sampling; my maths is poor but I’d get by with a calculator and a lot of will power. Hats off to data journalists, however.

Data journalists are deemed to be a special type of journalist who uses “a computer and simple software to analyse government data to reveal the patterns that tell stories which would otherwise be difficult or impossible to find” (Doig, Tanner/Richardson textbook). They find out extra information on anything from crime statistics to test cheats and political corruption. It seems they dab their fingers into all the hard core, serious, news worthy stories we all hope to one day be reporting.

So data isn’t just numbers, like house median prices and the average cost of fuel (all mind blowing news stories we’ve never heard before). Doig explains data as “information that is stored in table form, as an organised collection of rows and columns of information”. The type of information available in these data logs has enabled journalists to go “beyond anecdote to add actual evidence to their stories” (Doig). It doesn’t seem like all the numbers would be any good to a story, until you think of crime rates, poverty statistics, betting scams, fraud cases and realise that data is part of many important issues across the world.

The Data Journalism Handbook says that it’s important for today’s journalist to be able to understand and analyse data for news stories. “Gathering, filtering and visualizing what is happening beyond what the eye can see has a growing value”.

This handbook is fantastic in describing the importance of data in journalism, and sums it up with explaining that data content in news stories is the difference between being the first to report an issue, and the first to tell everyone what it actually means. It doesn’t just add numbers to the equation, but helps “shape” the story, explaining WHY things affect people, not just that they are being affected. The data journalist has a leg up because they are able to answer one of those fundamental 6 important factors of news, who, what, when, where, how and WHY so much better than the rest.

As for me, I’ll have to hit the books again to be able to keep up with the numbers. 1+1 = 2 right?

(image source)

Future, Funding and Finances

We all know that journalism is changing. The traditional methods of journalism are becoming obsolete, and with them, the traditional avenues for revenue. Although Life in the Clickstream survey shows that Australia has faired significantly better than other countries, we are not exempt from the issues that we will have to face in the near future.

As news increasingly adopts and adapts to the digital era, the question becomes, who will pay for the news? Traditionally, news was funded by advertising in the papers. Newspapers were printed and sold at a loss, which was counteracted by advertising sales.

But who pays for news that is online?

Companies are now realising if they put their content online for free, they are relying on advertising to pay their way. Online advertising still "represents only a small proportion of the total advertising revenue flowing into the media" (Life in the Clickstream). Online news sites are now attempting to introduce pay walls, where customers must subscribe or pay to view certain content.

The problem with pay walls? Well, we in this new digital society have become accustomed to accessing our information online for FREE. Journalist for CBC News, Don Pittis, notes the issue with pay walls - "the problem with asking readers to pay is that there is so much free and good quality competition". And that's just it. Why should I pay for information, that I can more than definitely get from another media source that isn't going to charge me?

Pay walls can't be the answer. Newspapers aren't sold for $1.20 for the cost it takes to make them. Online advertising is still finding it's feet, and once it does, I believe free will flow on. I agree with Pittis who believes that the pay wall may be of negative effect, in the long run, for media organisations - "It may be that by driving away the mass traffic of free, pay walls are cutting news organizations off from a very lucrative future. It is well known that advertisers are willing to pay well for the right kind of audience especially if it is big".

It's all or nothing with pay walls, and you're never going to get all.

Protect or Condemn?

Whistle-blowing is defined when “a member of an organisation discloses ‘illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices (including omissions) under the control of their employers, to persons or organisations who may be able to effect action”. (In Richardson textbook)

I don’t know about you but I instantly jump to ideas of Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. Has he tarnished the reputation of the whistle-blower? Should we be protecting those who spill the dirty laundry of their organisation?

Assange has made a name for himself, through his leaking of high profile and secretive documents of the US government. Now, is he a hero, or is he a criminal? We all know the high-profiles in the US aren’t a fan, but hasn’t Assange done the public a favour?

Many companies are now encouraging whistle blowing. And really, shouldn’t we all? There may be better ways to go about putting secretive information online for the world to see, but if it is in the best interest of the public to know (to be a whistle-blower the information you are leaking is defined as being this), these people should be able to tell their information.

 Whistleblowers Australia has been established to support and help protect those who have secretive information to share. Organisations like this would be beneficial for cases such as Gillian Sneddon's, in which she lost her job and was subsequently unemployed for several years after whistle-blowing about Milton Orkopoulous’s illegal behaviours. She reported legitimate misdemeanours and was punished for doing so.

 

Although I think we need to remember that  there is a big difference between whistle-blowing and leaking information (where it is deemed the information was not in the best interest of the public), there needs to be more laws to protect people who are doing the right thing by uncovering the wrong doings of companies, organisations or people.

 

 

                                     

Social media: Can't stop it, so make it the new way forward!

There is no way you can stop social media forcing its way into our profession. It’s here now and it’s staying, and I don’t particularly feel it’s a bad thing.

Social media sites have ridiculous amounts of users. Millions. When you put the rest of your journalistic training in place (think SEO optimisation), you have the potential to reach numbers beyond that of the population of your country.

Journalists don’t just write anymore. They aren’t the nameless, faceless person behind a story in the paper. Increasingly, journalists are becoming a brand, a personality type figure within society. Posetti says “journalists are being re-cast as individual reporter-brands” (2013, p. 89) and this is coming about because of constant engagement with social media platforms.

This is different to how we have operated before. Some may think it is bad, others good. There isn’t much we can do about it. Since the birth of our race we have been putting foot in front of the other and changing the way we live. In with the new, out with the old. I think journalists will continue to gain personality and prominence in this new media atmosphere.

Social media doesn’t only offer a new and exciting platform for the journalists, the news itself is changing form. Posetti outlines the benefits that micro-blogging sites like Twitter are having, as “challenging the notions of objectivity through the convergence of personal and professional lives; propelling the mainstreaming of ‘open journalism’ models, which promote collaborative research and reportage; and even upending established verification processes” (2013, p. 88).

Sites like Twitter get a bad rap when something untruthful unfolds through its channels. Like I mentioned in my debate during class however, it is the result of poor reporting, not the site that is to blame. Journalist and social media specialist, Neil Varcoe, details some of the solutions presented during a conference on ways to stop misinformation through Twitter, “One conference goer swaggered brassily to the microphone and declared: “Don’t tweet unless you have something to say.” This was accompanied by silence, then another elegant solution: “Don’t report rumour or speculation.” (Varcoe, 2013).

 I think we need to remember the benefits that Posetti outlines and remember that we need to harness the power of social media in the journalism industry. Once we invented paper we stopped carving into rocks.

Investigative Journalism: Dying or revamped?

Week 3 Blog

Growing up I fantasised about being the type of reporter that would break earth shattering stories, would hideout in building warehouses listening in on criminals’ conversations and discover the missing link in major scandals. I grew up and realised I had been watching too much television.

Although investigative journalism isn’t quite what I thought it to be when I was younger (and more
naïve), I believe it still plays an absolutely crucial role in society. Essentially, it is how we find out about things happening in the world and the truth about things we otherwise wouldn’t have known. It’s the journalist’s role to inform us, to teach and educate. Without investigative journalism work, we wouldn’t have uncovered the Watergate scandal. We wouldn’t have uncovered the abuse within the Catholic system. Without investigative journalism we wouldn’t hear or see the coverage of major political events or disasters. Basically, we wouldn’t know much of anything.

In recent times there have been claims of a decline in journalistic values, professionalism and work standards. Even journalists are questioning their own industry and the events taking place. Acclaimed British reporter Nick Davies argues that the influence of the PR industry, cost cutting and government enforcement is taking its toll on the profession as a whole.

Investigative journalism just isn’t given the most important aspect for success anymore; time. “If you take away time from reporters, you are taking away their most important working asset” he told ABC reporter Kerry O’Brien during an interview. It’s true right? Even in class we are told that deadlines are fast approaching an hourly basis, instead of what used to be daily, weekly or even monthly.

“And they churn it out. I use this word "churnalism" instead of journalism. They just churn this stuff over without having the time to check it, without having the time to decide whether or not this is what they should even be covering today. And it flows into the news and a lot of it is garbage”. (Nick Davies)

Even in our local papers we have probably noticed errors and mistakes on behalf of sloppy journalism and poor research. Journalism plays such a critical role in society that wrong reporting can mean more than just your job.

This slide show put together by the Huffington Post shows us some examples of declining journalism and what happens when you let your morals slip, you ignore journalistic values and you don’t do a Google search first.

 Carson talks about “nosey journalists” in the textbook. Although being nosy carries unpleasant connotations, it’s the type of journalistic values I would like to uphold. “Nosey journalists are likely to upset long-established non-inquisitive relationships between the media and officialdom” (Carroll as cited in Richardson). Ground breaking stories aren’t uncovered by people who sit in their office all day, scrounging through media releases for ‘news’. You can’t be afraid to rock the boat or not question something, simply because others aren’t or haven’t before.

Although it is argued that investigative journalism has changed and values are declining I still think there are plenty of quality journalists out there producing quality news. Peter Cave is one of my favourite journalists. He has literally put his life on the line to investigate stories and uncover the truth and he has the awards to prove it. His work over the years is the definition of what good investigative journalism is.  

Investigative journalism has gone under the knife, just like all other aspects of the media. Where there is good, there is bad and where there is very good there is the very wrong. The state of journalism is changing; hopefully we can remember that without investigative methods, we are in a bit of trouble.

(Picture source)