Jodie’s blog

As an avid reader and lover of books, I enjoyed the blog on the Frankfurt book fair on the BuzzMachine webpage this week.

Wikipedia classifies the Frankfurt Book Fair as the largest book trade fair in the world.

Jeff Jarvis, from BuzzMachine, attended the Frankfurt Book Fair to speak with the editor in chief of Zeit Online, Wolfgang Blau.

Wolfgang Blau. (Photo taken from: http://www.oecdministerialseoul2008. org/en/programmee/speaker_view.html?id=74)

Whilst there, Jarvis received a nice surprise when he discovered a pop art version of one his books featured on a wall at the book fair.

Jeff Jarvis and his book cover. (Photo taken from webpage: http://www. flickr.com/photos/16417087@N02/2952836342/in/photostream/).

This blog made a nice change from the economic turmoil that the world is experiencing and it was also nice to read a blog that didn’t contain the words Palin and Obama.

I watched with much interest on Monday as Channel 7’s Sunrise program introduced a new section to their show.

Each Friday Monte Dwyer will present a short piece on a place in Australia.

The interesting thing about this is that Monte will write, film, interview and edit the story for production.

Monte is travelling around Australia alone and with the aid of a MacBook Pro (that was released last week), editing software and the Telstra Next G network, he will be sending stories back to Sydney for broadcast.

It will be a studio on wheels.

It was fantastic to see the technology being utilised by mainstream journalists.

Watch the video here.

I was reading the headlines and articles on journalism.co.uk, the essential site for journalists, and a headline on USA multimedia, in the J-blogs section, jumped out at me.
Upon clicking on the link, I was transferred to Reportr.net where the full article was displayed.
After analysing 360 USA random newspapers, Professor Robert Bergland and a team from Missouri Western State University discovered that the newspapers were behind in the usage of multimedia tools that were readily available to them.
The research was released at the recent Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina.
The research clearly stated that the US newspapers had low usage of multimedia for audio, interactive graphics and podcasts.
Larger newspapers displayed more multimedia usage due to larger staff numbers with a variety of skills required to produce the multimedia.
In this day and age of technology, this research really surprised me. I thought Australia was behind in the speed and accessibility of the internet, which can effect who and how we use it.
I thought the USA would embrace multimedia, especially at the moment with the current electoral campaigns running.
This research was conducted over 2007 and I hope the figures have increased this year.
Along side this article was another post titled ‘US TV stations “don’t get” citizen journalism’.
This was also discussed at the same conference.
TV websites weren’t keen to allow citizen journalists to run stories on their the webpage.
How can the rest of the world be using citizen journalists to cover more stories and lower production costs, and the USA – the leaders of the world, be behind and not including this in everyday news.

Professor Robert Bergland from Missouri Western State University. (Picture taken from http://www.missouriwestern.edu/EFLJ/Faculty/bergland.asp)

I read with interest during the week ‘Citizen journalism ruins the world (again)’ on the BuzzMachine webpage.

I have frequented this blog before and read some interesting articles, sometimes not finishing them as the blog seems to drag on and also be uneasy on the eye.

That aside, I read the above article with interest since it was directly related to my current Journalism studies.

Jeff Jarvis writes on some attention-grabbing topics and I found this well written but was over 750 words in length.

Jarvis had been contacted about a rumour that the CEO of Apple had experienced a heart attack, which was published on CNN’s iReport.

Jarvis was asked to defend Citizen Journalism as the story spread and caused Apple’s stock to lose 10% of its value.

The story turned out to be a hoax.

Jarvis pointed out that the story may not have been created by a Citizen Journalist, but rather a clever individual who created the commotion and then collected some Apple shares.

A fellow iReporter released the following vlog expressing his opinions on what happened

(Video from iReport – http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-104216)

One thing I found interesting in the vlog is that iReport was correlated to YouTube.

CNN only assumes responsibility for the content when they select relevant stories and use them on their webpage – after fact checking I am sure.

With the current economic crisis in the USA, Apple didn’t need this type of publicity and the effect it caused.

I am sure we will hear more about this situation and how Citizen Journalists should be ‘controlled’.