Week 6 – New Tools for Reporting (Part 1)
Qualified journalists, cameras and newspapers are becoming a ‘thing of the past.’ The media world is becoming more diverse, using different tools to gather and report news to the world.
RSS stands for ‘really simple syndication’ or ‘rich site summary’. It feeds people news, audio, videos, and blog entries. This helps journalists, in particular, become more easily updated with the ‘world around them’ because they don’t need to waste their time searching for news. The RSS feeds news and other content to them instead.
Twitter and live reporting is a tool that was created in late 2007. It consists of live reporting and blogging via SMS or web. Each post is called a tweet and each tweet is limited to 160 characters per post.
BBC is one media outlet that uses Twitter to report breaking news. Different international and national stories are placed on Twitter for people to search and obtain news. Examples of stories posted on Twitter are the shootings at Virginia Tech in the USA, the Californian fires, the Melbournian boy, Yadav Monohur, who was missing and then found dead, and how Pakistan does not want to recognise Israel or have any diplomatic ties.
The internet would be a ‘perfect place’ if all the information on the web was factual. To access information quality the best thing to do is to remember then RAP mnemonic. Ask yourself whether the source is reliable, if it’s accurate in terms of grammar and spelling and furthermore is it plausible?
REFERENCES
Quinn, S. (2008). “New tools for reporting”
YouTube (2007). Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone: Interview retrieved 30 August 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiZpqalej0s
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