New Project!!!!!

My Family:

Moms Side
Nursing
Highschool
Roycemore
Italy

Dads Side
Mildrid
Montana


What Can I Do
Interview
Articles
Pictures
Videos

Take stories I get and infuse them with other stories, my experience, modern events/news.
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Ok so that was what I wrote while I was being told about my new project. For my project I was thinking about interviewing some of the people in my family and write about their stories. My main interest in these interview is probably my Dads parents, but theyre on vacation until march, I could probably start with my dad.

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Ted Talk: Beware online filter bubbles.

So I watched another Ted talk today, I didn't have my chrome book so I just took notes the old fashioned way. If I have time I will retype type this all.

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A Pep Talk from Kid President to You

With this blog format it is really easy to get distracted from doing work. Videos like these really inspire me to keep working, in addition to my grade, and I wanted to share it with you.  Plus its super cute so you should definitely watch this.

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Ted Talks

Ted is one of the best examples of modern media that can be found today. Hundreds of lectures, conversations, and speeches on every topic can be found in a really simple format. Its like YouTube only without all of the mindless content, although I love that too. I always want to watch these but I forget so from now on once a week I will watch one a week and review it. Here are a list of some of the ones I am most interested in.

We are all designers
Online filter bubbles.
Visual News
What is the internet

There are tons more that I want to watch but I will be starting with these four.

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Ted Talk: Crowdsourcing the news.

Today in class I watched this Ted talk entitled Crowd sourcing the news. In this talk, Paul Lewis, discusses the benefits that are achieved by using social medias like twitter, and facebook to create a complete version of events. He discusses two events where police reports are incorrect and using the power of the Internet he completes the story of two men's deaths.

Here are my semi-coherent notes that I took while watching the video.
strangers help in teaching and co-producing news
different perspectives added together to complete the story
the top officials can mislead people with their stories
newspapers accounts can change with edition
eyewitnesses collaborate and tell the real version of events
find people with the same information to prove
skeptical articles draw peoples own questions
someone somewhere has the proof
when people see the proof the other stories fall
the Internet can connect eyewitnesses who are very far away
information travels randomly through Internet but often gets to the correct place
people want to tell the truth and seek to get it off their chest
citizen journalism may be less respected so it needs exact verification
verify against other accounts to remove misinformation
people document significant events and share their stories
examples include the political unrest in middle east, Japanese earthquake
utilize the technologies that allow you to see individual stories in order to complete the story

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Newspaper Circulation

This infographic is a pretty powerful display of the drastic changes that have happened to newspapers. News papers were doing rather well until about 2005 where everything starts dropping. The wall street journal saw a giant increase when they began counting online subscriptions. Although I believe the future of modern news lies online it would be a really sad day when newspapers cease to exist.  

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Resource Breakthrough

I have been struggling to find more newspaper articles that deal with exactly what I need. Today during English we were researching for our next paper when I realized what I needed. THE DATABASES.....there is a database that focuses just on newspapers and more that have valuable information on my topic. I have to admit it was pretty stupid of me to not realize they were there the whole time. The next analysis will be up soon, after posting so much so quick I got a major case of writers block/apathy.

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Journalism Analysis Project: Infographics

Infographics are the first form of media I will be analyzing in relationship to the Newtown tragedy for my project. There are a lot of different infographics focusing on this topic. Many are about the gun laws that have come "under fire" as a result of this event. I will, however, be focusing on the infographics that show a broad description of the shooting as that is the topic of all of the articles I have collected thus far.

This was one of the first infographics I came across in my research. I was surprised at how quickly it was created; I say this because you can see that under number one it says that "his mother taught kindergarten at the school." When this event was first recorded many people believed that she was a teacher. However, soon afterwards it was revealed that she did not teach there. That "fact" was reported my many news outlets during the confusion following the shooting. 

I like that there are a lot of details included in this infographic. It explains the events very well to someone who may not have already known them. If this is the only thing that you have read about the shooting you may be more inclined to look for more information via other articles. This effect is basically the most important goal of infographics, to draw you in and make you want to learn more. 

The design of this infographic is rather simplistic. Because it was probably made in a rush, I can understand why it is this way. Your eye isn't really drawn to anything in this infographic at first glance. the colors are not very bold which makes the images blend in to the background. Where all the text has been placed makes the infographic slightly hard to read. The movement is very inorganic. Instead of having a left to right or up to down reading motion, the information is presented in a way that makes you have to look with a weird mix of the two. If this doesn't make sense take a look at the four steps that are presented.  While going from one to two you probably looked at the images and other side information. Then from two to three there is another image on the side; it would be more beneficial to have all the steps next to each other and the images later. 

If I was grading this I would probably give it a 7/ 10

To be continued.....

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