Looking Back

This week, in class, I was especially struck by Alexandra’s carousel presentation about the “continuous flow of episodic video”. I felt like the points she brought up in her presentation aligned very well with the topics we’ve been discussing in class related to the popularity of YouTube and emergence of streaming. I think looking at the way media has been impacted by the shifts towards television is an interesting way of analyzing our news values. It seems that television and broadcast journalism — according to Alexandra’s sources — have brought the values of “immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity” to the forefront of newsworthiness. While I still believe timeliness, relevance and impact are still important values for news stories, I agree with the idea that “when everything is urgent, nothing is truly important,” and believe that this contributes to the reasons that news fatigue is taking overt the country. The final quote of Alexandra’s carousel really stuck with me and felt like a sign of the times: “Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance.”

Latest News/Research

Another interesting reiteration of topics we’ve spoken about in class came from API’s Monday Newsletter, titled “Adopt a product mindset for news”. Interesting prospect. The first step was to focus on the user, or in our case as journalists, the audience. This section builds upon our recent conversations of trust and looking to the community you represent for future coverage, and a great idea: “After a council or school board meeting, set up a chair and a sign that says, ‘What do you wish you understood better about this place?’” While I thought this angle of news production was interesting, I did find the idea of adopting a “product mindset” for news a very interesting one, as I feel like this can also have a negative effect on news. It almost feels like the news is already being pushed as a product — what with paywalls and clear competition for attention. In a way, news i organizations are already taking on this mentality as they try to find the most eye-catching or shocking information to push to audiences in order to get more clicks, more views and more money. Boom. Connection to the Looking Back section. Similarly, Nieman Storyboard‘s newsletter this week touched on ideas of surprise, narrator’s voice and humanity in news stories, which offers some food for thought on innovating in journalism when it seems like our priorities may be out of wack.

But it’s not all bad. In a world where we’re consistently told the future of journalism is not as secure as it once was, young people aren’t consuming news anymore and everything sucks, young journalist are out there! And they’re backing each other up to fight against the threatened status of smaller news outlets and freedom of speech across campuses in the U.S.

Top Takeaways

The reading for this week provides even more evidence towards the idea that media is focused on revenue and uses multiple models to do so. With subscriptions, paywalls and advertising as a few examples, news media organizations are trying different ways to make money from their content production in an environment where fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for news. A big part of this reading that interested me was the idea that there should be an emphasis on retention of readers and subscribers as well as a focus on bringing in new consumers. This felt like a good parallel of our conversations on constantly churning out new content as opposed to intentionally and considerately tackling large topics in a way that keep people reading and enforce the quality and reliability of news organizations.