Belated Lecture One

Lecture One (27/02/2012)

Note: I am perpetuating all sorts of awful stereotypes about women and technology, because I only JUST realized I save drafted a lot of my entries. Nice going.

This lecture proved to be entertaining and intellectually stimulating, and made me understand why I am studying Journalism and why I want to be a Journalist. It sounds cliché, but I’ve always wanted to do it, and I’ve certainly always known this is the path I’d take.

The inspirational quotes Bruce put up, like “you are the Journalist”. It’s funny, because in this day and age, it’s almost as if everyone is. It was interesting to hear terms like ‘old media’ and ‘new media’, because I have always wanted to go into print. Doing an internship at the International Herald Tribune in 2009 really influenced my ideas on old and new media. It was awesome to see how new media shaped the newsroom. A lot of the correspondents used Twitter not only to communicate to each other, but to also spread news. As a political science student, I follow a lot of politicians on my personal twitter (@rivahiranand) and I’ve seen how this has helped their campaign massively – look at how active Kevin Rudd is and was during the time of the Queensland floods!

I’m ashamed to say that I found out about Osama Bin Laden’s death via Facebook, because it is the first thing that I check in the morning. It’s an effective (duh) social media platform that integrates media use and media production. Going back to what I said earlier, it also provides people with the opportunity to share and to create news. It’s interesting to see how Facebook developed and has become not just a social networking site, but also a way of life now. I found it really interesting that Facebook has also become a platform for producing news and stories. Obviously, you cannot trust everything you read on Facebook, because things can get sensationalized or just be shared without people fully understanding what is going on, but its phenomenal that some people can get their news from their facebook feed.

What this lecture got me thinking about was how the world of journalism is changing.  While new media can be really effective in connecting with your audience, I really love the idea of old media and print! It is quite scary that my dream job may well be obsolete at some point in the future, and that there is a massive focus on online news as opposed to print. It’ll be interesting to learn more about it during this course though!

Riva