September 2009 Archives

Christiane Amanpour

Madeleine Scinto
| September 30, 2009 6:49 AM TrackBacks (0) Comments (0)
Two words: kick ass. That's Christiane Amanpour. She's a woman whose bold, adventuresome, battle zone crazy and over 50  Amanpour covers the hottest, most controversial topics and regions out there... Bosnia, Palestine, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan to name a few. Bullets, mortar and genocide really don't seem to be a problem for the woman. And what's better, she doesn't mind sniffing around and asking big honchos about it either. 


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Amanpour is the kind of lady who would mortify your grandmother at the dinner table...she loves the two subjects you can never talk about but are so delicious...religion and politics. 

So being this big journalist superstar--she's the chief international correspondent for CNN and before that reported for 60 Minutes---you would think she'd have an internet footprint a mile-long. And what do you know? Yep. She does. Pictures, videos and biography entries about her bust up the internet. 


Her CNN bio with her awards and recognitions a mile long:


"She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe to Africa and beyond, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria and Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat among others. After 9/11 she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Her body of work has earned an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmys, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award and other major journalism awards as well as honorary degrees from The American University of Paris, Georgetown University, New York University, Smith College, Emory University and the University of Michigan.

In 2007, Amanpour was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her 'highly distinguished, innovative contribution' to the field of journalism. In 1998, the City of Sarajevo named her an honorary citizen for her 'personal contribution to spreading the truth' during the Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995. "



George Stephanopoulos interviews her about elections and work:





Amanpour on Colbert Report:


She's all over the place and for good reason. She's a great journalist. 

Interestingly enough, if you'll notice, she's on the internet in a completely professional way. The only personal information I could out about her was on wikipedia...and we all know how reliable that can be...which said she had a son and was married to a former employee of the State Department. 

That of course will be changing..but does it really matter? Um. Probably not. As far as I'm concerned almost no personal information on the internet about Amanpour would deter me from watching her. I mean, how can you beat a 50 year-old balls out woman who runs into war zones and calls our major world leaders?

Twitter: 90007 and Villaraigosa

Madeleine Scinto
| September 20, 2009 8:56 AM TrackBacks (0) Comments (0)
     So let's be honest with ourselves...  Who goes to city council meetings? Who sits through school board functions? Who is interested in listening to the county board of supervisors drone on and on? And who even knows what the heck the water district does? 

     Most people, and no one blames them, don't follow local politics. Reading up on local politics  can be time consuming and boring, and it often misses the "so what?" elements. (Plus, to be perfectly honest, local politicians can be wildly incompetent...it's depressing.)

     The whole thing is unfortunate because local politics, believe it or not, tends to have a greater impact on people's daily lives than any other kind of politics. How the school board votes, for example, will have a greater impact on your child tomorrow than any Race to the Top bill. How the city decides to rezone property near your neighborhood will have a bigger effect on your immediate property value than anything the state passes. And just take little things...like if the city decides to change parking laws or increase the price of tickets. It could negatively impact you everyday for a very long time. 

     Policies that local politicians pass will have a much greater and immediate impact than national or state policies. It's local, it's faster...like it or not..that's the way it is..

     Plus, people who don't follow local politics are missing out on some quality entertainment. Have you ever seen the "bar flies" of city council meetings? Have you seen the people who religiously go to every meeting, every week like the council room is their Mecca? Trust me, it's so much better than any soap opera or reality TV show. And if you secretly enjoys things like the Blago chronicles or the Sanford saga, then you'd love local politics. It's like national scandal but on crack. 

     A couple years ago, for example, the people of Orange elected a complete loon onto to their Orange School Board. No one really understands how he won the election. Some people think he might've won because his name was first on the ballot and he gave himself the title "educator." He actually didn't campaign at all. ( It shows how little people follow local politics.) 

     So the people elected him, Steve Rocco, to be an Orange School Board Member. He started going to every meeting and accusing the Orange School District, and the other Orange School Board Members, of all these crazy conspiracies. 

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Steve Rocco
Courtesy of the Orange County Register


     Rocco accused his colleagues of many things; one of his accusations being that his colleagues were trying to censor him at meetings and violating his freedom of speech. He tried to sue them but lost. 

     Of course, the fun didn't end there. Rocco decided to go to Chapman University, two of the Chapman professors did a documentary on Rocco, and steal a Heinz ketchup bottle from the cafeteria. The city actually prosecuted him for stealing a 25 cent ketchup bottle. 

    If that isn't entertaining...please tell me what is. I mean, come on! It's so amazing it's delicious. 

     So anyway, now that you know you want to follow local politics, if for any reason at all at least for the entertainment, you can actually do it in five minutes or less.

      And the answer is...drum roll ..TWITTER! YA! Yes, you heard me, that website that named itself after bird chirps. I know it sounds stupid, but if you want to hear about local political happenings in no time then go to twitter. 

    I went to the Twitter search engine and typed in "Villaraigosa." In the zipcode I put 90007 and clicked that I wanted to read tweets within a five mile radius. And battabing, battaboom, out came news about some new Villaraigosa happenings. For example, did you know...


     Or what about this...

  • Newvoice_boysmall__logoai2_normal
    voicenewspaper: Mayor Villaraigosa will address press questions re: LA City Council's actions on the passing of the City budget at 2:30pm TODAY -
    Los Angeles
    1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet



     Twitter: It's the beauty of local politics in 140 characters or less.

"Playback" : Obama's Health Care Speech

Madeleine Scinto
| September 13, 2009 7:08 AM TrackBacks (0) Comments (1)

Live blogs, excited tweets and re-mixed broadcast clips flooded the internet last Wednesday as journalists scrammbled to cover Obama's health care speech. Websites tried to be new and sassy in synthesizing the story through a combination of innovative multi-media techniques.

 Politico and The HuffPost provide two good examples. 


HuffPost

Bloggers/Journalists of the Huffington made comments about Obama's speech on a bloggers reaction page as Obama gave the speech.  All the bloggers/journalists that participated in the live blog have been writing about the health care debate since this past summer, when Obama initiated a reform plan. As can be expected of the Huffington, a liberal leaning website, the bloggers gave Obama very positive reviews.

 Examples include:

Paul Begala: "Obama's speech rallied dispirited Democrats, reassured disenchanted independents and intimidated Republicans. He called out lies, and pledged to call out the right-wing thugs if they continue lying.

Peter Dreier: "Having a president who inspires people to act collectively on their own behalf can make a difference. It gives people hope and courage to defy obstacles."

Ray Hanania: "The President's speech was so powerful it probably sent many of the nation's health insurance industry robber barons into economic cardiac arrest."

However, some of the Huffington bloggers seemed upset about the President's lack of commitment to a public option.

Cenk Uygur: "Why bah humbug Obama's health care speech? Because it went almost exactly as predicted. Great rhetorical flourishes, but did anyone hear him say that he was definitely going to fight for the public option? No."

But most were upset about the Republican "You Lie" and Sarah Palin. Why liberal bloggers chose to pass the attention to Republicans, the same Republicans who are very out of power, beats the who-ya out of me. I guess it was more entertaining to write about...

John R. Bohrer: "Republicans are so high on themselves that one thought nothing of screaming, "Lie!" at the President of the United States as he was, ironically, in the middle of dispelling their lies."

Bob Burnett: "On September 9, Republican members of the House and Senate acted like petulant fraternity boys forced to attend Sunday mass."

Shannyn Moore: "Palin's Facebook page response to the president's speech on health care reform, I had to walk away and count to ten -- in Russian. Here is her statement with my response."

As you can see, the entries were very pithy and straight to the point. They mimicked a sort of twitter style without the exact 140 character limitation. The bloggers also had the option to make their comments longer by linking to their own blog pages, although the only thing that shows up on the Huffington reaction page is the short blurb. 

The most interesting aspect to the live blog would be the twitter feed Huffington attached to the bottom. It's interesting to see the citizen perspective on the speech alongside the pundit comments. What's more interesting is which tweets Huffington decided to add to its page. It shows what the Huffington perceives as important public comments or at least what it thinks public comments should be.

 

Politico

Politico covered the speech through a mixture of strategies.  Throughout the day it posted a lot of articles written about the upcoming address as sort of a pre-game or lead-up to the main event. It also summarized the health care plan and added some analysis, like a traditional news outlet would, immediately following the speech. One of the articles that compared Obama's speech to Clinton's 1993 speech on health care reform was particularly interesting. The Politico journalist, Eamon Javers, went so far as to count the number of times both Presidents used the same jargon in their speeches. However, the more telling analysis Javers made related to the style and composition of the Obama speech versus the Clinton speech.

Politico also effectively used it multimedia to cover the speech. It condensed Obama's hour long address into a series of five minute segments. Each segment was subtitled, which made it very easy for the user who did not want to watch the whole speech get the main gist of it. It included a 6 minute highlights reel.

"Highlights of Obama's Address":


 


Other Politico segments included...

"Obama lays out public option"



"Obama on Kennedy Letter" 
 



The news site also did it's re-mix of "cable chatter" from all the different broadcast organizations.  It made it easy to get reactions from the pundits and proved to be entertaining, thanks especially to the Rep. Wilson "You Lie!" comment. 




And, in true Politico style, something funny from the speech...



HuffPost vs. Politico

These two very different websites captured the speech coverage in different ways. The HuffPost, being more partisan focused, used it as a kind of rallying moment. Its bloggers/commenters tended to be positive and when they weren't it was only to attack the right (aka Wilson comment and Palin). Politico, on the other hand, used the opportunity to blast around 50 pieces on the subject. Many of the articles lead up to the Obama address that day; the articles provided a lot of pre and post analysis. Politico also pushed its multimedia through its "playback" videos and the segment highlights. Of course, both the Huffpost and Politico provided a full transcript of the speech and video to go with it.


 



Citizen Journalism Beats a Bad Rap

Madeleine Scinto
| September 5, 2009 4:19 PM TrackBacks (0) Comments (0)

 "It's not hard to see why Santa Ana is floundering under more than a $40 Million dollar budget deficit," says Thomas Gordon in his OC Blog entry. "Why is Santa Ana,.... tossing out an additional $162,911 to a bidder that should have accurately bid on the scope of work?"

Gordon's criticism of local spending exemplifies the OC Blog's purpose. The website functions as an Orange County Republican watchdog network, a forum for citizen journalists to share information with other OC GOP-ers about local political happenings. According to the Blog it "aims to educate readers, spark discussion, and forge common ground among the most distinguished political and business leaders, activists, and organizations in Orange County." The OC Blog has become the go-to place to learn about local Republican affairs.

The OC Blog captures the two primary functions of citizen journalism. First, it provides the community a convenient social networking forum. People who share local political interests come together and coordinate themselves; it works as an effective community-organizing tool. Second, participants give a first person perspective on events and provide input on a hyper-local level. Their accounts act neither as a passing interest nor something someone assigned he or she to investigate. Rather than taking that quick bite of the world, citizen journalists share a bit of their own lives and contribute unique insight. The clips witnesses posted of the Mumbai attacks (2008), the Virginia Tech shootings (2007) and the London Bombings (2005), for example, all testify to the idea of sharing personal life bites. These happenstance citizen journalists exposed what was a local issue for them and turned it global with the World Wide Web.

Citizen journalism challenges professional journalism in several ways. Due to the very nature of citizen journalism, citizen journalists develop a much stronger connection with readers than their professional counterparts. The stories written by citizen journalists communicate directly to their website participants.  In addition, citizen journalists have an easy time writing about the genuine interests and concerns of the community because they are active participants within that community. Professionals should use citizen journalist websites as places to look for leads.

Dr. Bentley, Journalism Professor at the University of Missouri, explains, "The essence of new journalists is to treat the Internet as a massive wire service upon which billions of stories run each day. New journalists can search through this mass to find content most appealing to his or her readers."

Professionals should also take advantage of citizen journalists who act as watchdogs. The Exposing Earmarks project, a website created to expose the pork added to congressional spending bills, demonstrates a great example of citizen watchdog work. Each time citizens uncover new pork it gives professionals an opportunity to write a full story about it. Citizen watchdogs also better the field by pressuring journalists to get the facts right a hundred percent of the time.  They prevent dishonest reporting like Rathergate, an incident where CNBC correspondent Dan Rather misreported a story about President Bush and his National Guard service, from happening again. Perhaps if Rather had leaked some of his material before running it on air, citizen watchdogs could have saved him instead of embarrassing him out of his career.

Citizen journalism should not be perceived as a threat but as an opportunity for change and innovation.

 

 

Sources:

 

 

Bentley, Clyde. "Citizen Journalism: Back to the Future?" Discussion paper prepared for

the Carnegie‐Knight Conference on the Future of Journalism, Cambridge, MA. June 20‐21, 2008.

           

Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

            O'Reily Media Inc.: Sebastopol, CA. 2006.

 

Glaser, Mark. "Your Guide to Citizen Journalism." Media Shift: Your Guide to the

Digital Media Revolution, Public Broadcasting Service. Sept. 27, 2006.

 

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. Penguin Group Inc.: New York, NY. 2008.

 

Wagner, Mitch. "CNN Creates Citizen Journalism Channels on Web, In Second Life."

The Information Week Blog: The Information Week Business Technology Network. March 24, 2008.


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