Rob Kirk Sky News

Presentation Evaluation

Our presentation went off without many hindrances- I think the fear is always going to be that the technology isn’t going to work which would have been quite ironic in our case! My only regret is not being able to interview Rob Kirk earlier and had that as part of the presentation. Hopefully everyone can watch it on here though- he had some interesting things to say. Essentially the world is changing, there’s room for journalism but journalists need to adapt. We need to be multimedia chameleons, and hopefully that came out in our presentation.

The video was fun but I think it was important to make that basic point- how can journalism stay on top of the rate of change in technology and the way we communicate?

We set out to be a multi-platform group and I think we achieved that. It might be interesting to note that from the very first blog meeting we split ourselves into different mediums; people were delegated television, online, print and radio, but we soon realised how they bled into each other.

What became apparent to me over our time of study was that the future isn’t so gloomy. People like Kevin Sites (he was quite popular with the rest of the group!) and David Dunkley Gyimah are setting an example for future journalists; we just need to adapt to survive, and it is possible. That’s the bottom line.

Audience…

In these sorts of discussions it’s often very easy to forget the most important people : THE AUDIENCE. We can get bogged down in navel-gazing and forget that without our listeners, our viewers, our online visitors, we’d be out of a job. So Chris and I went to Falmouth town to find how are the audience reacting to the changes in multi-platform delivery?

Review on our blog/presentation

Hey everyone!!

Finally we have come to an end with our blog/ presentation and well done to everyone. We worked really hard and came up with such creative ideas. At the end we all managed to put our messages across about the multimedia platforms and how traditional newspapers were being affected. It all went very well during the presentation and everyone of us enjoyed doing it as much as others enjoyed watching it. Thank you so much for being such a wonderful team and the hard work we all had put in.

I must say I was very pleased with the video that Josh, Chris and Rachael had come up with. Since I was in Nepal, I couldn’t contribute much in there. But nevertheless the video summed it all and it was just beautifully filmed and ofcourse very entertaining. It was a masterpiece and including that in the beginning we definitely grabbed everyone’s attention and everyone were entertained. Josh’s acting was topnotch and well performed by everyone. I think the video was something very different we had come up with. Intially we knew we wanted a video soon after Charlotte’s group tutorial when she mentioned it’ll be good to film. But we didn’t exactly know how it would go but at the end we all pulled it off.

I think what really worked for us while preparing the presentation/blog was we divided our parts and concentrated, researched more on the areas we were interested in and put them together. Also we came up with using the different means of communication like interviews on radio, video, acting, voxpop in our presentation. Overall we had a variety since it was all about how the mediums was changing in this digital era. Including interviews from BBC by Chris. Also i believe the international angle which we included in the presentation was interesting for people to know how vastly contrast the medium is in Nepal as compared to the developed places. It showed internet is still not the main means of communication and is surely has not affected as much as in abroad. Voxpop was good to include because it showed how different people thought and interviewing different genres of people we came to know their thoughts on Internet. Thus we have tried to put out different varieties to show on our topic and it all seemed to have worked really well together.

Acting scripts prepared by Rachael worked very well and was interesting. Not to forget mentioning about Kevin Site was very impactful and an example how he was managing to do everything by himself during war reporting. Like everyone mentioned it was the video that broke the mould which was creative, clearly delivered how the role of journalist was changing from old to new and most of all ENTERTAINING. Well done guys!!!

Also since I missed 2 weeks presentation of other groups from what i have heard through my colleagues, all the presentations has been really good and very informative. Everyone’s topic given was widely contrast and they all had come up with new and creative ideas as well. From my involvement in the blog/presentation I learnt that it is very essential for traditional journalism like newspapers to adapt to the changes in these changing times of journalism. But not at the cost of affecting its news delivering quality and its content. Also how the role of journalists is changing and how one is expected to be multi tasking. I learnt how the role of citizen journalism has emerged significantly in the recent years especially during the Mumbai attack and Hudson plane crash. Nevertheless professional journalists and newspapers are still considered by many people as one who/which provides most reliable source to its audience. But inorder to compete in these such vastly changing times, it is very much essential for them to adapt to the changes and be more innovate, creative since they are a vital resource to keep the public informed. For the moment at least, it threatens traditional journalism but it has not developed a discipline that can replace professional journalism.

Also like mentioned during our presentation, we became really clear while researching that in the future, we won’t talk about radio, television, newspapers, and the internet as separate entities: everything will merge together to create a new, hyper journalism.
I believe through our presentation/blog we came to know what the current journalists from the industry think of multimedia platform delivery and achieved to look at the use of multimedia in the future. Overall we have achieved to know how multimedia delivery in the world of news is affecting us as journalists; how is it changing, what do these changes mean for us and what will happen in the future?

Overall it seems like I just have positive things to say about our presentation with the way everyone has showered comments 🙂

A review of our blog and presentation

 

With our presentation behind us and our final posts in sight, I thought I’d write a blog on what we’ve found out about Multi-platform Delivery. Whilst watching BBC Breakfast this morning – they announced the BBC will be televising the Cambridge v Oxford boat race in 2010 for the first time in six years. The race which has been running for 155 years (2009) will be broadcast not only on television but also on many other platforms – a thing that has NEVER been done. At the moment it’ll be broadcast on television, radio, online and through mobile phones, and I’m sure there will be other platforms that will be utilised nearer the time.

I think this example sums up the main issues I/we have found while doing this blog/presentation. Multi-platform delivery IS here and IS changing the way we consume news, sport and entertainment. Rolling news on various platforms IS the norm now rather than a unique feature. I players, Listen again and Sky Plus are all used and it would be unimaginable to be in a world without them. The way journalists work is also changing and we have to adapt to cope with the demands to compete in a multi-platform world. From speaking to journalists who are doing this NOW, we can see how our jobs are going to be hectic but also arguably more interesting. It also opens many paths in relation to media regulations and ethical decisions which have to be made at greater speed, or on media which has previously been unexplored – such as Twitter (until recently).

I think we used a variety of media platforms to try and explain these points, and I think our teamwork was really good. We could have used more quotes from more famous journalists to highlight our point. After having Sky News’ Robert Kirk watch our Live @5 show, perhaps we could have talked more about the multi-media differences between the Beeb and Sky. Robert was emphasising that Sky journalists are more specialised in a profession (reporting, filming, editing) and this works better for the corporation – whereas the BBC is searching for journalists who are capable of writing, filming and editing across at least three platforms.

Multimedia Platform Delivery Presentation (26/02/2009)

GROUP BLOG Presentation

Role of multimedia platforms in Nepal

Dinesh Wagle Interview (Nepal)

I have attached above the link about the interview that I used during our group blog presentation to differentiate how vastly contrast the news delivery is in Nepal as compared to the UK. This helped us to put an international angle to it by covering the role and usage of newspapers, radio, television and ofcourse the use of Internet which is defined as the ‘new digital era’. But if you listen to the audio, you will discover how backwards the media sector actually is in Nepal.

Kevin Sites – the online war correspondent

In the hotzone…

“One man, one year, one world of conflict!”

I can’t be the only one who thinks this sounds like a tv format- as so much does on the web these days. As commissioning editors churn out tired ideas on our tv screens, along come the forward-thinking web developers. I’ve certainly never heard of a war correspondent working exclusively online like Kevin Sites did for Yahoo back in 2006-08. I find his hotzone site very interesting in the context of the things we’ve been looking at. Most of all I believe it offers a glimpse into the future- video blog entries uploaded each week, made by one man with minimal, necessary equipment.

It seems remarkable that all the content can come from a mere rucksack of stuff. Just look at the part of the site where it shows Kevin’s equipment; it shows you just how far technology has come in a few years. The cameras are light, the satellite phone is tiny and there are entire editing suites on computers the size of hardback books.

As technology becomes easier, more complex, smaller and cheaper the possibilities become great- but questions are raised. The technology is available to almost anyone and the number of voices straining to be heard rises and rises. This is the twitter universe. We choose who we listen to but have less of an idea about who they are.

The hotzone may be a bad example because the reporting is excellent and Sites is obviously a well-respected correspondent, but this is still one man’s take on the world. The camera never lies? The irony of that old saying is that the camera can only ever show the perspective of the person who uses it. If journalists are expected to create accurate unbiased reports, it’s surely a lot harder to do it alone?

Multimedia charity

I only caught half an hour or so of last night’s Comic Relief (was having toga issues at the time…) but I couldn’t help noticing how multimedia-orientated it was this year. The normal lines of communication were of course there (phone voting, physically collecting with buckets etc) but you could also donate by text and by pressing the red button. I thought this was a very clever way of getting people too lazy to write down a phone number and go ring, to do their bit. I think it also opens doors for other charities to raise money: could we soon see a whole new ‘donations’ page on the red button multiscreen?

On the defensive

The digital editor of This Is Cornwall has posted an angry reply to a reader’s claims that their journalists spend too much time blogging and not enough time out on the streets reporting. He says:

“We have more reporters in every area across the county than anyone else, who work their hardest to bring more local news as it happens from their district offices. And online, we’re now uploading far more content than ever before.”

But, as someone very sensibly raised in the discussion after our presentation, what about people who don’t, for whatever, have access to the internet? A quick flick through any of the local papers shows that really, most of the news stories comes from obviously emailed press releases, fund-raising events and the odd police alert.

Having spent two extremely dispiriting weeks working for my local paper (which shall remain nameless), I can confirm that most local reporters spend all their time glued to their desks, only leaving the office to go for lunch at the pub next door. Only once was I asked to go out and vox for local opinion on a story. And this wasn’t a newspaper office based in the sticks, where it takes half an hour to get to civilisation; we were in a place with a population of 10,000. 

The website for the paper now makes a big thing of having a weekly video round-up of all the local news on its website. Meanwhile, the content of the physical paper continues to go downhill.

Methinks Gareth Bartlett doth protest too much.