Mediamum » Media & Journalism

Television and kids? Let’s start with the news

mediamum — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:40:03 +0000

“It’s a horror movie right there on my tv.

And it’s shocking me right out of my brain.”

Horror movie… Skyhooks.

Charlie has decided he wants to watch the news on television.

This is a pretty big deal for us, because nobody else in the house watches television news at all. Ever. When I was young, Roger Climpson on Channel Seven was our standard 6pm news broadcast and I’d kind of watch it while arguing with my brother or getting ready for dinner. However, it was a routine. It turns out watching television news, for me, was all about passive loyalty. A habit rather than a conscious decision.

When we moved to the US, where I knew none of the channels or presenters, watching the news was something of a novelty. But it wore off quickly and for more than the last two years now, nobody in this place watches the news on tv.

The fact my 10 year old wants to watch the news would be applauded by many. Yet I’m concerned. He understands the difference between obvious fiction and obvious reality. To him, the news is obvious reality.

He does not yet have a solid grasp of the detail of geography, different political and cultural issues, and ‘reasons’ given for wars and conflict that are reflected and alluded to in news reporting.

He is, however, passionate about the environment, respecting others, and doing ‘what’s right’.

I can already see a lot of extended conversations arising from him watching the news, and more of a problem is that I simply don’t have final answers.

So last night we sat down together to watch. (There was no way I’d let him watch the news on his own – Family Guy, yes, but not the news. And I hate Family Guy – I banned it, but this was recently overturned by a mutiny. Anyway, that’s another story.) After 15 minutes or so he turned to me and said “Mum, there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on in the world today isn’t there? Was there this much when you were a kid?”

It was a good question. It might seem like there was less bad stuff, but maybe I was just not sensitive to the amount of it because it was just noise. It was routine. It was in the background of everyday life.

In the paper today, tales of war and of waste. But you turn right over to the tv page – Neil Finn, Don’t Dream It’s Over

Before long the news was finished and another news program began. Incredibly, with exactly the same stories of the previous program, just told by different reporters. When one of them used a trite throw-away pun sentence to lead into a story, it became too much for me. I told Charlie we were turning it off, and he didn’t mind at all.

I wonder if he’ll want to watch it again. I wonder if the stories will be different. I wonder if it’s possible to teach a child of this age that the full story can’t possibly be covered in a one minute, thirty second story – even if you follow that thread in tv news for the entire length of the situation (eg a war). He wants more answers than that. He wants news that’s relevant to him, that he can comprehend, that educates him. All our children deserve it.

Wouldn’t it be great if the major news stations created a version of news for younger viewers instead of the same level of reporting all the time?

Why Aussie mum bloggers shouldn’t ‘win’ payment for K-Mart posts

mediamum — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:04:12 +0000

Yesterday I received an email through the Aussie Mum Bloggers network, inviting me (and every other Aussie mum blogger) to write a post here on Mediamum.net about how to get the best value out of $20 at K-Mart. If I did it, and sent the link in, I would be in the running to be one of 20 people to win… a $20 K-mart giftcard!

K-mart's offering a carrot. You deserve better.

Now, I know that blogger relations in Australia is a bit of an unknown quantity. Many Aussie women probably feel a little flattered that an offer is being made at all. It’s tempting to jump at it without considering it too much.

But, much like when you were a teenager dancing at Sweethearts at Cabramatta and some guy with a mullet and a Holden said “let me drive you home,” take a minute to think.

Think about what you’re worth.

And if you have a hard time with that one (after all, some of us let that guy with the mullet take us home. Ahem.)… then think what your readers are worth. Even if your readers are less than 10 a day – heck, 10 a month. What are they worth?

And if your blog and its readers are worth more to you than $20 a post – and that’s if you ‘win’, then give it a miss. Truly, if you say you’re only doing it this time, then what’s to make any company think you’re worth more in the future?

You’re building audience, readership, and value. You want people to return to you every time you post, and read what you say. You want to engage with people – build relationships and resonance. I don’t see how morphing those goals into some convoluted contest where you win payment for space allocated to a company that should be paying you for it in the first place actually fits in here.

K-Mart, this space is worth far, far more than $20. In fact, if you like, I’ll sell you some advertising space – after all, that’s what you basically want here. I’m insulted that you think $400 is all you need to pay for a minumum of 20 advertorials on blogs. My brand is worth just as much to me as yours is to you. Some respect is justified. You need to begin treating mum bloggers and their communities with some real respect.

Unmoderated reader comments are a news fail

mediamum — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:44:27 +0000

Some mainstream media have incorporated the fantastic ability of the web to allow reader comments to stream live.

Apparently, the misguided professional believes this is a wonderful way of operating public journalism, which seems to be so popular right now. Really, we’re demonstrating our real connections with our audience.

Unfortunately, when reader comments are opened on every story, and allowed to run rampant, your brand (yes, journalists, you’re running a business which means you have to market yourselves) is ready to be decimated.

Reader comments can turn a decent 300-word professional piece into a free-for-all featuring the most unbalanced, extremist morons in the universe whose opinions get quoted and requoted across those pages of reader comment and through wider social media, completely dissolving any semblance of decent journalism.

Including reader comments is simply not necessary on many stories, especially as the stories are developing. They should not be included on stories that obviously invite the freaks of society to come out of the woodwork. Those people who use every opportunity to make accusations that are political or racial and have no relationship to the story. You know, the freaks that are on talk-back radio (and who should stay there).

Nor should reader comments be on stories that include painful information relating to families who not only have to live with their tragedies, but also have to suffer the narrow-minded opinions of people who treat them as fair game – in media they are ALL going to read.

Professionals – if you wouldn’t include it in the copy because it’s conjecture, non-factual or simply not a good reflection of your masthead’s position in the market, then don’t give it voice anywhere else – including in the reader comments.

Just to finish (and to act as proof), here are some stellar reader contributions live from today’s online press:

“i hope this guy fries…put a bullet in his head and save us some money and rid us of this moron…shame on him…and hope he goes to hell;” (Denver Post)

From Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, on a story about a ghostly picture taken in a cemetary, “It shows how labor has continually been re-elected for 12 years, because half of Sydney are truly gullible fools who will believe anything.”

And finally, from the UK’s Daily Mail, on a story about a swimming pool banning nudity in its showers: “any child that hasn’t seen a male naked, has been let down by their parents.”

Classy.

Why save the Denver Post?

mediamum — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:26:16 +0000

As I predicted right here on Mediamum.net in March 2009 when the Rocky Mountain News folded, Colorado’s the Denver Post is now also in trouble. Its owners are asking for bankruptcy protection.

They’re still not humble.

I’m hearing professional journalists and academics in journalism blame all sorts of things for this situation:

1. Falling ad revenues (you know, that’s a failure of the business model that the traditional media organizations have held onto like a liferaft with a hole in it). The Washington Times reports advertising revenue has fallen 40% since 2005, according to the Newspaper Association. It’s the advertisers’ fault.

2. Reader ADHD. People just aren’t interested in “real” news any more. They’d rather read about Ashton and Demi than Haiti. It’s the reader’s fault.

3. Too many people don’t respect the value of newsprint. Everyone is too ready to go online for a format of news that suits them. It’s the internet’s fault.

I’ve heard it all. Except for the truth. It’s the newspapers’ fault.

When the Denver Post runs stories that are simply repetitious of ones posted days earlier, like this one on skiing and helmets, it’s not professional.

When the Denver Post lets its reader comments run along with no moderation on the LEAD story yesterday (I’m not kidding) about a Colorado evangelist’s wife who is trying to forgive him over various indescretions, it’s not professional. (That’s right, The Denver Post thinks you should be happy to pay for this crap.)

My point is, that unless newspapers wake up, get humble, and realise they are creating content for an audience that has a discretionary choice across many formats, they will continue to close – and until professional journalists and editors start creating and moderating content worth paying for across these formats, they deserve to close.

The bells have been tolling for a long time. Take your fingers out of your ears.

Sydney Morning Herald blames bloggers for incorrect Haiti image

mediamum — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:23:31 +0000

In The Sydney Morning Herald’s role as gatekeeper/the fourth estate, those paying for its content deserve a standard of professionalism that is better than those it does not pay for.

Is a t-shirt necessary to tell the difference between professional journalists and citizens? You can buy this one at www.zazzle.com.

That’s the idea, anyway.

The Sydney Morning Herald, however, doesn’t understand how to work online. One key aspect of journalism is the newsgathering process. Professional journalists are supposed to be well versed in newsgathering. They are fully trained and have a wealth of resources and contacts in their reporting toolkits. They gather and filter information to create news pieces that hold reliable information for society.

That’s why today’s decision by the Herald’s Jessica Mahar to write a story denigrating “bloggers” for posting pictures online that were not actually of Haiti’s current quake aftermath, but of other incidents is a dumb move. The subs have titled the story, ‘Bloggers jump gun with wrong photos.’

I’ll start lightly. The fact that the Herald has run one of the “fake” images again is a poor editorial decision. Unprofessional, however, is the decision to not identify the source of the image at all. (The caption reads Photo: -) Additionally, the lack of any links at all from the Herald’s story when many would have been appropriate is a red flag to me.

Extended quotes from a random computer science guy named Miguel Rios? No identification of who he is other than his name, or where his affiliation is. Why not link to his Linkedin profile or something? (Like I just did.)

Mahar chose to use inflammatory quotes from Rios calling for some checks and measures to be put in place by a respected entity to ensure this kind of mistake doesn’t happen. Mahar is kind of saying “look, social media can hoodwink you – this is why you need us professionals.”

The embarrassment, dear, comes from the fact that I believe the only reason this story was created was because the Sydney Morning Herald stole the “fake” images in question without any transparency of where they were sourced from. They didn’t check it out and the plagiarism was only discovered when the images turned out to be false. This makes the headline here incorrect. It wasn’t the bloggers who jumped the gun. It was the professionals at the Herald.

And of course, the fact that the readership of the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out the inauthenticity of the images “almost immediately,” according to the Herald’s own online editor-in-chief is something that makes even more of a mockery of the situation – and of the professionals who can’t or won’t see and accept responsibility for their own errors.

Here’s a tip: American news organization CNN is doing a far better job in newsgathering using online sources. While CNN could do better by linking more, its coverage of Haiti using the personal stories and images collected across the Web offer a better level of transparency than that offered by the Herald.

Islam and the media – without media.

mediamum — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:24:02 +0000

The Islam and the Media conference, held by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (January 7-10) was a huge success in bringing together leaders in thought and practise on religion and media. But you wouldn’t know it if you’d been watching mainstream media.
At a time in our history that international front pages and lead stories are obsessively dealing with some aspect of Islam, it’s interesting that of all the mainstream media reporters on religion who were invited to attend the conference or interview any of the delegates decided it was not enough of a priority. Surprising when the topic is hot, and when local media simply had to come to campus on any one of three days (including the weekend) to talk with any of the world leading scholars (including Elizabeth Poole) on Islam and its representation in popular and digital media.
If I were a reporter with a beat, I’d not only be sure to be on top of the content, but the least I’d be doing is reporting on key influencers in my area.
Perhaps if there had been some events at the conference that reinforced the moral panics international media have aligned with Islam, we would have seen a greater presence of professional reporters – but they would have been reporting after the fact, by their own choice.
Should religion reporters have reported on this conference? Attended it to find out how their media is conveying ideas and representations of Islam?

Image courtesy Library of Congress

Unveiling the panic of Islamaphobia? Or does it serve traditional media to maintain and pander to the ignorance of the people who pay for what might or might not be newsworthy?

Were the Christmas miracle mother and baby "saved" from epidural?

mediamum — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 16:02:26 +0000

Ah the miracle of medicine, look how much you’ve done for women and babies. Birthing in the Western World is no longer fraught with danger, thanks to your hand.

Or is it?

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The oh-so convenient Christmas miracle story splashed internationally across mass media headlines of a Coloradan woman and her baby dying through childbirth and then “inexplicably” being revived held readers spellbound. It was the perfect gift for editors – as a front page, it sold papers.

But media did not report the facts – they just told a good story.

In birth, medicine has moved beyond monitoring women and fixing stuff that goes wrong to getting in there and making birth a “medical procedure.” Whether a woman is likely to birth successfully without intervention or not is not considered when offering everything from epidurals to c-sections to “patients” who are armed with the gift of choice, but not the gift of a full education about the side-effects each of these interventions carry.

Do they know that as soon as you introduce one intervention, the likelihood of more being required is exponentially higher? Epidurals lead, often, to more intervention. Why? Because blind freddy can tell that if you can’t feel your body, if you muck around with its ability to do the work it was naturally trying to do, then it’s going to be more likely to repay you in kind. Epidurals are not headache tablets for birthing. Too many women believe they are. Too many women give their birthing up to medicine with no reasonable or rational cause. They’re missing out on the most powerful experience of their lives – and often recovering from major abdominal surgery. Society is also paying through the nose for these unnecessary surgeries. Over 30% of American women now have c-sections. Before long it will be the “normal” way to birth.

Media did not question the fact that Tracy and Mike Hermanstorfer were being “prepped for childbirth” in a medicalized setting with pitocin delivered and an epidural being inserted, and that apparently coincidentally Tracy’s heart stopped after the epidural. (There is real research into the side-effects of epidurals… this link to the American Pregnancy Association states more than 50% of American women have epidurals – but if you read to the end, the very real possibility of cascades of intervention and medical trauma directly related to the epidural, including severely lowering heart rates of both mother and baby are basically outlined. And that’s if they put it in correctly.)

Henci Goer reported on this story yesterday, for Lamaze International. She outlines the details of potential medical responsibility in the trauma endured by this family. Additionally, in ABC News’s video interview with the doctor and Hermanstorfers, the cascade of intervention is described – but the reporting does absolutely nothing to question further about those interventions.

Traditional media are failing us in reporting on birth. We are so accepting of medicalised birth that media do not question medical responsibility in this family’s trauma. Instead, it celebrates the “Christmas miracle” that sells its papers – and the UK’s Daily Mail even went so far as to credit the doctor for bringing back lifeless Tracy. Again, the business model gets in the way of good journalism. Find the quickest story that sells the paper and pulls a heartstring, not the story that takes research and investigation.

I know many religious people have already adopted this story, calling it God’s hand at work. Others will say “thank goodness she was in a hospital (where our human-made gods are) – what would have happened if she were at home?”

What indeed.

Disrupting the barriers of media in the 21st Century

mediamum — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:38:21 +0000

This pre-internet installation was and remains a vital consideration in the future of media. It has been supposed for a long time that communication and media technologies allowed people who already knew each other to improve existing relationships. Alternatively, broadcast media were used to send corporate-owned messages to the ‘masses’. There has been very little in the understanding of communities and how they are built and morph through media. To date, due to the expense of entry to creating content for media communication technology, most middle class people have been limited to the telephone – and that form is one-to-one rather than the one-to-many formats offered by social media. This installation’s first day shows how people who did not know each other were able to create conversations and relationships – even for a short time.

People in the video respond a certain way because they realize people in the other location can actually see them. This created an ‘event’. In the 21^st Century, when everything that happens in public locations could readily and easily be posted to the web, are we seeing a change in everyday public behaviors due to the fact that we are aware, more than ever before, that someone might be posting our actions? From music concerts to classrooms, from traffic accidents to natural environments, people are creating ‘events’. The greater questions are how have we as a community become the public entity we are creating, and what impact does this have on how we relate to each other. What has made people immediately reach for their cell phone to take a picture when something happens? This is a stage of history we’ve never faced before.

While we have come through an era where “the medium is the message,” we have moved on from this. The medium is still the technology. The message today is found in the resonance of community. One is not the other. In fact, the irony as stated by Steve Harrison in his essay on this particular video (found in HCI Remixed), is key. Separation does in fact, invite a connection. If we believe that human beings seek resonance with each other, eliminating some of the barriers to finding that resonance through disrupting the accepted norms of relationships and community will in fact deliver us to new ways of ‘seeing’ each other. Through these new ways of discovering resonance we will be able to grow an international array of communities. The international would relate not just to geographical space, but also class space. We have a media which will offer everyone an opportunity to find resonance of community with the homeless, the traditional-media famous, and their neighbor.