JACC Slideshow

This past weekend I attended my first ever JACC conference. I took somewhere around 400+ photos and made a slideshow out of them. This is only the rough version of it because I have to slow down a lot of the transitions and speed up ones that are too slow.



To see more photos from the trip got to my flickr.

The Newspaper is Personal Again

While watching TV a few nights ago, I caught Hewlett-Packard’s marketing campaign, “The Computer is Personal Again,” and thought about how so many newspapers could thrive if they adopted that very concept. We are living in a time that capitalizes on convenience; personalization is the key.

Dan Gillmor writes in his book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, For the People, that “As the pace of life has quickened, our collective attention span has shortened.” The Huffington Post, the largest and most linked to news blog, was quick to develop a model to appease this fast lifestyle with the introduction of their "Big News Pages."

“These pages allow us to gather together— both from HuffPost and from around the web—all the best news and opinion on a hot topic and bring it to you in a compelling, easy-to-digest format.”

–Arianna Huffington

The idea was simple: to become the aggregator of existing aggregators. According to Wired, aggregators

“allow users to subscribe to feeds from sources as diverse as the BBC, Sci-Fi, Today, Slashdot and thousands of bloggers across the world. The services work by checking an Internet address at a regular interval, usually once an hour, to see if new content has been added."

One of the most popular aggregators, Digg, skyrocketed from 2 million users in April of 2007 to 15 million users and counting. Where the Main-Stream Media may choose to dismiss the power of aggregators, the HuffPost has used it to give its readers the ability to personalize their newspaper, allowing them to discover

“all about the topics you are most passionate about or want to know everything about.”

Putting the power in the hands of the public to become editors of their news content seems like an amazing idea, after all, as Benjamin Franklin would say, “time is money.” And if someone offers you a resource that will save you countless hours of net surfing by filtering all the stuff you want to read, of course you’re going to take it. So, you’re telling me that I don’t have to ruffle through the paper, get my fingers all dirty, skim through all the headlines until I find something I actually want to read—and I don’t even have to pay the daily 50 cents? I’m sold!

“Hello, I mastered in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society.”

In the last 2 months I’ve spent a great deal of time researching universities to transfer to next fall, or if I'm being realistic--next, next Fall, or maybe next decade. Although I’m not yet ready to work on my Masters, I’m seriously considering this a future option:

Hope Launches World’s First Beatles MA
Liverpool Hope University has launched a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, the first of its kind in the world.The new course, which can be studied both full and part time, covers four modules with specific issues relating to The Beatles and Popular Music, consisting of four 12-week taught modules, plus a dissertation.

Mike Brocken, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Hope, said ‘There have been over 8,000 books about The Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address.

‘Forty years on from their break-up, now is the right time and LIverpool is the right place to study The Beatles. This MA is expected to attract a great deal of attention, not just locally but nationally and we have already had enquiries from abroad, particularly the United States.

”The Beatles, Popular Music and Society’ marks a seminal advance in popular music studies. For the first time in the UK and possibly the world, a postgraduate taught course is offered to research into The Beatles, the city from which they emerged, the contexts of the 1960s, technology, sound and songwriting and the industries that have set up in their wake to capitalise on tourism in the city of Liverpool.’

For further information, please call the postgraduate enquiry line on 0151 291 3389.

I’m not even joking. I’ve always wanted to go to school overseas. I'd be proud to be a Beatles Historian. Degrees in something useful are overrated, right?

As for more attainable matters, for my BA I’ve been looking into these schools/programs :

Loyola Chicago, Journalism

University of Washington, Classics, Romance Linguistics or Journalism

New York University, Writing or Performance

Safety:

San Francisco State University, Journalism: concentration in Photojournalism

Cal State Long Beach, Journalism major, Classical Studies minor, Film minor

Oh yeah, about my project. I'll be catching up this week.
I fell a little behind 'cause I had 3 essays due last week for my English classes. =(
It doesn't mean I don't love you my wittle Multimedia class. You bring me much joy.

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The dawning of the Multimediast

What's black and white and completely over? Give up? It's newspapers.
-Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

While many websites like newspaperdeathwatch.com have propped up to chronicle the "death" of the newspaper industry, I begin this blog on a much more optimistic note: to chronicle the successes of newspapers across the country--at the same time trying to understand why the papers that are still in production have succeeded and why those that aren't, failed. I also intend on documenting my own quest to become a 21st century journalist, ready to embrace the ever advancing technology at my fingertips and to celebrate the many dimensions that multimedia has brought to the realm of journalism.

Watching this episode of The Daily Show, which aired last year shortly after the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy, I couldn't help but break out into a fit of laughter-- all while thinking, "He didn't just say that," and then laughing some more. It's a good joke, but as my mom pointed out, it didn't really warrant my reaction. The laughter, of course, was a defense mechanism used to soften the jab dealt to a field which I have long admired and sought to be a part of. So I laughed it off, pretended it didn't bother me--until I was up late the next night thinking about the future, in particular, my future.

I had long romanticized the idea of becoming a journalist in thanks to Oriana Fallaci, fictional characters like Lois Lane and Peter Parker and movies like The Great Race, Citizen Kane, and It Happened One Night. Maybe I'd be swept off my feet by a Superman while sitting comfortably in my cubicle at the Daily Planet, or I'd become a masked superhero that exposed every villain's dirty secret. Or, maybe, I'd monopolize the entire industry (insert diabolical laughter here). Maybe I'd spit in the faces of world leaders and destroy them with my pen. I'd write exposé pieces about injustices around the world and win a Pulitzer Prize. If you're gonna dream, might as well dream big, right?

But, on that night in December the reality began to set in. As, Jon Stewart suggested, the newspaper is over. At least that's what many people, both spectators and those in the industry, seem to believe. I beg to differ. See, I LOVE the paper. I like that my fingers get dirty. It isn't enough for me to read blurbs online; I need something that I can grasp.

So, I seek, for my own sanity, to answer the question once and for all: will the news go paperless? I come to this with an open mind, willing to learn, and willing to change my mind if at anytime I feel that I am wrong.