Blogs worth monitoring – week 12
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)
