Journalism and/or Blogging by Nicholas White

Doing an Ethnographic Field Study of Brandon Huff -- watching and learning how the life of journalism works -- is an extremely daunting task to complete. I learned, while observing Huff, writing can be a physically relaxed job but it includes internal pressures of job security, resource acquisition and financial security. The interests in reading stories have changed from getting the full, truth to only receiving a general concept of the breaking news, thus changing the discourse.

As Brandon Huff, Managing Editor of BlockShopper LLC, currently assigned to the San Fransisco Chronical and the COnnecticut Post, said, "Journalism is a different type of writing -- to be honest. [Nowadays] it's an extremely fast pace style of writing because of the internet, with stories typically being published within the hour of first-hand report, as far as breaking news goes."

"The feature story, to me, seems like it's dying. This is because news is being produced so fast that fewer and fewer journalists are spending the time needed to produce a strong feature."

Staying Aware of your surroundings is one of the most important concepts, in my opinion. This can take many different forms: culturally, economically, politically, and so on. But one thing is certain, that news is tied into all of these current events. With this being true, journalists are one of the first to get the information, disseminating it through mass media. Some people follow news everyday on television, in magazines, newspapers or even through online resources. Some people says news is false, misleading and sometimes even comical, as Local ABC channel 9 News Shows:


"Today's journalism is more about 'getting the scoop' than getting the story correct," said Matt Pelc, managing Editor at BlockShopper LLC. "In year's past the medua would have to double and triple check sources, but now they just go with a story when it is a rumor because they may get the story right and then they can say that 'You heard it here first on CNN' or whatever the organization it is. However, 9 percent of the time when the story is inaccurate, no one will remember who first reported the inaccurate story."

Professionalism is the biggest debate between journalist and bloggers because there is a code of ethics and knowledge that one obtains with professional writing. Technicallt, the definition of "professional" is someone who can live off of thier work, which man bloggers do not do -- in my opinion. Journalists live to write and will never opinionate a story because of thier duty to keep the public quickly informed, accurately.There may be regional biases within the news stations and papers but the stories themselves are always pure information. Problems between the two media platforms are based on the mediums used to express the information, as Matt pelc commented, "...Also, there is truly a lack of journalism these days. Newspapers are dying, so they are becominf more web-based and the internet rarely has the same level of journalistic integrity that other sources have. Cable news used to have news stories, but now its just political leaders dishing out talking points untested by the host with thier same ideology or the two people from the opposite sides of the aisle yelling at each other."

Other people read newspapers and daily columns for updates about thier surroundings in the world. I would argue that using online media and "surfing" the World Wide WEb for validity in my research because the knowledge within that tool is so extensive, I can find anything I want to by just about any writer. The World Wide WEb is connected and networked so well that it can be considered a single unconscious form of expressive information. Proper representation is needed for public legitimacy in this discourse, and therefore not all references are utilized from the web. Matt commented on journalistic resources:

"Well I think that in the past people felt more comfortable doinf research with Encyclopedias and libraries with thousands of books for reference. Today's journalists are under pressure tog et the story done quickly and for less money (making them take on many different jobs at the same time which causes them to rush through an assignment), so they simply go to the internet for research and some of its inaccurate or cannot be authenticated."

Journalists write, record, photograph, blog, tweet, and talk about current events as they happen. Using so many different platforms, it's not just the newspaper and magazines that people expect:

News is captured and created by journalists who use diagnostic rules, treatment and inference in the current event to provide a “snapshot” of that event (Lowrey and MacKay, 2006). A great deal goes into making a story happen because information must be gathered, references need to be included, and the information must be relayed to an audience. Typically the bigger the audience, the bigger the cash flow to that source. With internet resources creating a financial battle for newspapers and journalists, the majority has elected to co-opt the technique of using the internet and its resources for their line of work.

“According to this framework, occupations exist within a network of other occupations and institutions, occupations seek to encroach into the jurisdictional areas of other occupations, and these interconnections influence decisions and work processes, as occupational members try to adjust to external challenges” (Lowry and MacKay, 2006).
Incorporating technology into the mainstream media flow has already been implemented by multiple countries, which do have the capabilities to update their news: Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries have their own blogs to help relay the mass amounts of information they encounter daily:
http://www.news.com.au/blogs?useAbsoluteURL=true

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog
As my experience goes, I have learned that there is so much more behind the journalism portion of blogging than refreshing the actual blog itself. The amount of time it takes me to produce a story, I could already searched the web from many other stories that relate to the topic so I can formulate an inference on my own. Creating my own blog, I have been using mass media and online references like the Whitehouse blog (http://www.whitehouse.gov) and news reporting websites like drudgereport.com and associated press.com to obtain news. Then I write about the reoccurring themes in between the resources for situational validity. This fast paced style of news is beginning to overrun the traditional form of writing and literacy because instead of using Encyclopedia’s and Libraries, people now jump onto the World Wide Web and get their information as fast as possible. With this changing literacy, there are dynamic mediums to develop these new news pieces, which are revolutionary within the discourse itself.

Literacy in the popular culture of a group of people is very indicative of their perspectives. In learning how to blog and “attempt” to be a journalist, I have learned that this form of information gathering is very common within our culture. People know a little about a lot and this is the classic emic vs. etic approach within anthropology and analysis itself. My main point, the dynamic discourse of learning, is rapidly changing with technology to be faster paced, and the Net generation is already launching more and more information that people need to deal with.