When I interned for a small magazine over the
summer, I realized that instead of getting a story straight-on from the source.
Instead of reporting directly, I felt like it was just another story that
gained popularity through other news outlets. Mass Amateurization is like that.
From Clay Shirky's from, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” he points
out that a boy, who was loving the Dave Barry popular column, was helping the column’s popularity by
piracing. Shirky mentions in his article that newspapers haven’t been
blindsided by the upcoming fad of the internet, but instead, they were
expecting it. What they didn’t expect was how fast the internet took over that their side projects of trying to
save the newspaper business didn’t work out. He talks about how many people try
to revamp the consumption of newspapers, but it has failed miserably. For
example, Shirky points out that the idea of information being “walled up” isn’t
enchanting at all. People want their news, and the more they gained from the
internet, the more they were willing to go around the walls.
Media publishing and consumption has
changed drastically from this due to the consumption and publishing of the internet
as a whole. Nowadays, you can get news from anywhere. WorldStarHipHop is a
video-based type of news that has people randomly recording fights that would
break out randomly. How is this news? Sometimes, the more shared the
WorldStarHipHop video is, the more it becomes news because of how viral it is. That’s
when the viral fighting video website became a phenomenon. Now, they’re trying
to report real news like how Buzzfeed
became famous for their cat videos and now they’re a news outlet with their
famous listicles and relatable lingo.
WorldStarHipHop was famous for their fights |
The clown phenomenon has become newsworthy
because people have been taking pictures of these clowns that would appear out
of nowhere. Not reporters, people have been taking pictures and posting PSAs on
their Facebooks and Twitters. It stopped being a simple whisper throughout the
news world because of the civilians who have been reporting more and more
sightings that have been terrifying. There are videos about clowns running up
to them or clowns being beat up by groups of people who are not willing to deal
with it.
Civilians have been reporting clown sightings by taking videos and pictures. |
WikiLeaks has been leaking news for a
while now and reporters have been getting information for their stories from
there from time to time especially now with all the new Clinton drama that they
have caused with more leaked e-mails.
Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, released another batch of Clinton E-mails. |
Jenkin’s “Why Heather Can Write” may
have been written a couple of years ago, but it still rings true today. Heather
had started a J.K. Rowling Harry Potter fanfiction web-based newspaper site,
and it has blown up. I can’t tell you how many times a friend has come up to me
and made jokes about how if they were going to be a famous writer that they
wouldn’t be thanking the Nobel Peace Prize winner of Literature. Instead, they
would be thanking username HarryPotterLover4Life for their amazing fanfiction
and how their love for Dumbledore has inspired them to get where they are.
What is the future for media
professionals? David Carr said it best, “The ability to do journalism, to reach
audiences, has never been better. I like your odds. I do.” Yes, it’s very
threatening for journalism students who want to make it big as a journalist,
but I believe that, with all this media consumption that we have at our
disposal, is a tool that we can use to share news all over the world. Shirky
even pointed out that newspapers, back in the day, were very expensive to make.
He even talked about if the people were questioning the advancement of media,
it’s because they are willing to lie to themselves about how the newspaper
business is dead.
“And so it is today. When someone
demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really
demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are
demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in
place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in
peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading
information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are
demanding to be lied to.”
Shirky stated, “Society doesn’t need
newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Letting a kid copy and paste news is
how news spread around in the first place. I do believe that there needs to be
structure and decorum when it comes to the details of copyright and such, but
when it comes to knowing about
something, shouldn’t it start from the developing tools of media instead of
people having to climb up walls in order to get their news?
Works Cited:
[1] Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
[2] Jenkins, Henry. "Why Heather Can Write." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 173. Print.
Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 173. Print.
[3] Carr, David. "David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students." The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2015. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
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