Monday, April 14, 2008

My Digital Newsroom presentation

Over the last seven weeks or so, I’ve been blogging about entertainment news stories in the media.

On a regular basis, the media’s accused of giving entertainment news stories too much prominence – but there’s no escaping the fact that millions of people are interested in the latest celebrity gossip.

In fact, I’m sure the majority of people reading this would rather read about Amy Winehouse’s never-ending drug addiction or Britney Spears’ ongoing marital problems than read about Gordon Brown’s latest speech.

For this assignment, I’m going to discuss how this year’s Oscars ceremony was covered on news websites.

First of all, how did news websites take advantage of the digital newsroom to gather information on the Oscars?

CNN’s website invited people to review this year’s Oscar-winning films and share their opinions on the films and actors that won. By encouraging people to be I-Critics, CNN encouraged interactivity whilst gathering content to publish on its website. Such a technique is innovative as ordinary citizens with no experience in journalism can become involved in the newsgathering process and have their work read.

The majority of news websites featured blogs to provide additional coverage of the Oscars and to encourage people to comment and make their opinions heard. Furthermore, discussions in particular blogs provided news websites with stories. One story on Sky News’s website is about the role blogs had to play in the writers’ strike that threatened to put an end to this year’s Oscars. The story says that according to the anonymous author of the Writers’ Strike blog, blogging was more effective than picketing as writers could have a direct link with their fans.

In terms of presentation, this year’s Oscars ceremony was told in a very interesting way on the several news websites that I looked at.

The amount of pictures and videos on BBC News Online was particularly impressive. People were given control over what to look at and what to read about thanks to a slideshow of pictures. Furthermore, BBC News Online gave people the chance to view videos of the many acceptance speeches from the night. After all, it’s far more interesting to see and hear actors’ speeches rather than read them in a story.

Finally, let’s consider one other way that news websites could have covered this year’s Oscars ceremony. They could have used maps to show people were certain films were made to encourage more interactivity.

No comments: