The Power of the Media: Revisited

After re-reading my original post here on WordPress, I find that my beliefs and views on the power of the media haven’t changed much throughout this course.  I still believe that the media has a large amount of bias, and it comes through in every form and vehicle that is used to disseminate information. I also still believe that the media chooses to report on stories that have the “human interest” factor that drives consumption. Writers of media content play a massive role in shaping our views on the world, and as such, must hold themselves to a certain ethical standard. Hopefully this standard is such that it reflects the medical community’s Hippocratic Oath of “First, do no harm”.

Papyrus tent fragment of the Hippocratic Oath

Writers of media content may write their content for a large number of reasons, usually because they get paid for it. Should this change their personal ethics when creating this content? Should these writers’ respective ethics be a mirror of the company that they work for or their boss? Or should they hold themselves to a higher ethical standard and choose to write content that does no harm to others? As the media is so pervasive in all of our daily lives, seeing content that is ethical in all ways can only make a positive difference on our lives as individuals and also as members of a global community. This can only serve to change all of our lives in a positive manner as a result and perhaps even lend itself to the social betterment of all of us. If media content creators do the opposite, the risk to ourselves and our communities grows. Instead of improving our social environment, we will move down the slippery slope of media content only for financial gain. This shows why it is so important for each of us to become media literate and to teach our children to be media literate as well.

Media Literacy

Media literacy combats any lack of ethics in media content, If we are media literate, and know how to find the reasons why the particular content creator is sending their articular message, we take the ethical choice off of the content provider, and make it our own. This way we can protect ourselves against content that may be unethical. We are able to find the facts behind the message and decide for ourselves whether or not that content should play a role in the making of our own opinions or beliefs. By becoming media literate, we are able to decide for ourselves what is ethical and what is not and choose to surround ourselves with similar ethical messages. While it would be wonderful if all media content producers took it upon themselves to write ethical content, this is something we know is just not feasible for everyone. By taking the onus to become truly media literate, we allow ourselves to be the true gatekeepers of the media content that we absorb every day.

References

Baran, S.J. (2015) Introduction to mass communication: Media literacy and culture. (8^th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill

Kovach, B. & Rosenstiel, T. (2010) Blur: how to know what’s true in the age of information overload. (1^st ed.). Bloomsbury USA, New York

The Use of Multimedia in Blogs

Multimedia content can certainly enhance a blog in many ways. Using multimedia can reinforce the story that you are telling by providing different voices and showing differing opinions. It can also make the content easier for someone to read, by breaking it up and fully engaging your audience. By involving use of different senses through multimedia tools, your blog can provide quality content to your readers and help you to “create a single resource full of useful information that will engage your readers and keep them interested” (Smith, 2013)

Visual aids can easily grab a reader’s attention, and can bring closer attention to the written content you’ve included. Multimedia content can also make your blog more easily found by search engines, making it more easily found by people looking for similar content. In example, “any images that you add to your posts can also be found on Google Images”, helping to drive traffic to your particular blog (Smith, 2013). Other types of multimedia content you can add to your blog to make it more appealing are videos, pictures, podcasts, hyperlinks, infographics, social media, slideshows, and audio. Each of these should be used to enhance and not overwhelm your content. Make sure to use these when they make the most sense and also where they break up your written content. This makes both the multimedia content and written content of your blog easier to digest by your audience.

Also, you should pay attention to what types of multimedia you use within your blog. Some types work better with different written content. Also, you should be sure to not completely overwhelm your written content with multimedia. Having a video placed every paragraph or two can be distracting to a reader. You might also want to think about “going back over some old content and adding something new to refresh it” (Smith, 2014). Multimedia embedded in a blog can elevate your content from that of a traditional newspaper article to a fully integrated resource that provides the reader with many different sources of information. A good resource for different, easy-to-use multimedia types is the website Educational Resource Tools: Multimedia Tools. Take a look at this site to get some additional ideas.

A few sites with quality multimedia examples are listed below. These sites utilize multimedia to enhance their content and make it much more visually appealing to their audiences. These are very good examples of how to use multimedia content in different ways that I’ve personally engaging as well.

• http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/meraux_foundation_embroiled_in.html
• http://www.duckrabbit.info/
• http://www.multimediamuse.org/
• http://hollowdocumentary.com/

References

Smith, M. (2013) Why multimedia blog content is good for your website. Retrieved from http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/why-multimedia-blog-content-is-good-for-your-site

Sundar, S. (2000) Multimedia effects on processing and perception of online news: a study of picture, audio, and video downloads. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~dshah/blog-club/site/Sundar.pdf

Successful Blogging in the Blogosphere

I spent some time researching best practices for blogging and found a few interesting key elements to creating a successful and powerful blog. Blogs should be “used to help establish authority through content that adds value to your industry as a whole” (moz.com, 2015). In this way, it should be professionally written and cause no harm to yourself or anyone who has relation to it. Content should be creative and bloggers should take pains to “think like their users” (moz.com, 2015). A blogger should take the time to post content that their readers really want to know about and avoid going off track. Timing is important to a blog, as how often new posts are made can impact readership. A blogger should also ensure to provide content that is engaging. This can be accomplished by adding links, photos and videos and other multimedia to make the blog more interesting to read. Blogs should also be fully functional and kept up-to-date. A viewer of online content hates to click on links that fail to work or videos that have been removed due to copyright issues. These are just a few of the best practices I found in my research that can lend themselves to creating a successful blog.

In this post, I thought it might be interesting to look back on a blog I created years ago for the purpose of analyzing it for these particular elements of successful blogging. I thought it also might be interesting to compare the elements of this blog, created years ago, with this blog that you are reading now.  I created the blog “Di & Ang’s Excellent Adventure” (https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html) back in 2012 when my sister and myself took a cross country road trip in order to share our trip with our friends and relatives. I feel like many of the best practice elements I listed above were reasonably well accomplished in my old travel blog. I wrote this for a very particular audience, of which I knew every member besides those who might access the content publicly.

I believe I posted content that my readership was pretty interested in, and definitely didn’t post anything outside of the scope of our travel. I didn’t get into musings etc. about anything besides what we were doing or what we saw. Timing could have perhaps been a bit of an issue for this blog, in that as the trip carried on, I was less likely to post as often. This was a result of inaccessibility to internet and also just plain laziness. I believe that on this end, I may have slightly disappointed my audience. I think that this blog was engaging and did have a lot of pictures that were uploaded to make it more readable and less wordy. These pictures also gave the reader a true visual of the places we visited along the way. I do see my tendency to overwrite happening here, as I have in many other places in the past, which distracts from the content a bit as well. All in all, I would have scored myself a good 70% of the top possible blogosphere grade.

I’m seeing many of the very same elements of my previous blog in the WordPress blog you are reading now. I believe the content is quality, but perhaps a bit overwritten. I think there could be a lot more multimedia elements to the blog to make it more engaging to my readership. But, since this blog was created for the sole reason of completing coursework, I feel like the content must be limited as well. If I was writing for myself or my business, I would have to take into regard a different audience with varied desires on what they want to see here. Timing of posts would have to be treated the same way, and be based on audience wants and needs.

Blogging to me is pretty much free-range journalism. Bloggers are not held to the same code of conduct as professional journalists, which can have both a positive and negative effect on their work. Perhaps bloggers should be held to the same standards as publishers, but this may alter their content and make it less free form. If held to a blogging code of conduct, we may miss out on the function of blogging as a journalistic entity all to itself with no rules or obligations to the reader or writer. Perhaps if we all held ourselves in life, as well as in the blogosphere, to some MORAL code of ethics, the necessity of having individual ethics codes for each part of life would be rendered obsolete.

References:

Burton, B and Greenstein, L. (2011, August 28). Food blog code of ethics. Retrieved from https://foodethics.wordpress.com/

Fiorentino, D. (2012) Di and Ang’s excellent adventure blog. Retrieved from https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html

Moz.com. (2015) The beginner’s guide to social media, blogging. Retrieved from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/blogging

Social Media Tools

For this blog entry, I’m trying some new media tools in order to give some feedback to you about ease of use, potential audience of the tool, and what tool might be best used by which particular audience.  I’ve used most of the tools mentioned on the reference page (https://aids.gov/using-new-media/tools/index.html#tool-bookmarkingNew), with most of my time spent blogging, on mobile communication and collaboration tools, wikis and social networks.

One tool that I signed up for years ago, but have rarely used, is Twitter. Twitter is a site for “micro-blogging”, and is a way to share short snippets of information (140 characters or less), quickly. I signed back in today to see where I had left things. Unsurprisingly, I have 0 followers, and am currently following 5 people and/ or groups. Twitter played a large role in Egypt’s recent revolution, by helping to ignite an uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National Democratic Party. I remember hearing all about how protests were being organized through Twitter, as it was one of the very few media outlets the government did not control. In this way, Twitter can play a massive role in helping to share information and news quickly and can help people unite across other existing borders.  The audience for this tool tends to be younger, and more educated. If you’d like to be my first follower, you can find me @dcfiorentino.

The next tool I chose was Instagram, a photo sharing site. This was something I have been avoiding. I’ve seen a lot of pictures posted to other social media that have been altered by Instagram’s filters, and I can’t say I was overly happy with the result. Things looked just a bit too fake to me. Instagram seems like it’s used more often by younger millennials as a way of documenting every second of their lives, whether it be appropriate for sharing or not.  My first issue with this site was actually signing up. I couldn’t sign up with my laptop, and had to download the app to my phone. Once I managed that, I had to log in with a different app (Facebook), so as to not create a new account, and then answer about 32 questions about who I should follow and who should follow me, along with any interest I might possibly have in birding or horseback riding. As I’m sure you can probably tell I won’t be an avid Instagram user. I leave it to my younger cousins with the patience to answer all these questions.

The last tool I chose was podcasts. I feel like I used to hear about people podcasting content all the time, but lately it seems as though podcasts are disappearing, most likely being replaced by sites such as YouTube. I chose to take a look into the podcasts of the Hill-Man Morning Show, which I listen to almost every morning on my way to work. I chose this, because this show is probably the only reason I’ve heard anyone mention a podcast in the past year or so. It was actually quite interesting to see the list of the show’s podcasts on their website. It’s very easy to grab snippets of the show to listen to, or go back to in case you missed anything you really wanted to hear. I was able to find a podcast from the other day of an interview with the Massachusetts governor, which was pretty funny, and I didn’t have to listen to the whole show to hear it. I think this tool is excellent for documenting sound bites and for referencing them in the future. I can’t see much use for this tool for the everyday media user.  Here’s the site: http://media.waaf.com/hill-man-morning-show.htm.

I hope I gave you some useful feedback on the usage of these media tools. All in all, my feedback would be to use Twitter to check in from time to time, but if you have something really interesting to say, you’re probably going to need more than 140 characters, so it’s a no-go. Instagram was hard enough to sign up for, so I can only imagine what it would be like to put a filter on every photo I take. Stay away. Podcasts can be useful when researching and documenting, but as a way of spreading information seem to be a bit antiquated. I’d love to hear your comments on this!