Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

One of the big buzzwords in the marketing and pr fields is “convergence” – which refers to the techniques and cultures of traditional vs. social media merging together and blending. According to a new study from PR Newswire, the convergence trend continues. The company’s researchers find that a growing number of traditional journalists are using blogs and Twitter when researching stories:

The company also reports that 52% of the bloggers they surveyed considered themselves to a “journalist.” That surprises me, frankly, because I don’t consider myself to be a journalist. But I suppose that many people who once blogged for fun have shifted that activity to Facebook and the like — leaving the blogging for those of us who want to explore some topic in-depth and write more than 144 characters at a time.

Hat tip to TechCrunch for spotting the story — yes, another blog.

This is what I like to call “non point source information.” According to the latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than 9 out of 10 Americans “graze” on news from multiple sources throughout the day.

The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio.

Almost as important, about 3/4 of online news consumers use email and social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to forward links around to their friends, family, and coworkers.

Expect this basic trend to continue for the foreseeable future.

I thought this mashup of Big Brother and traditional journalism was silly at first, but upon reflection, it’s actually an important experiment. MSNBC is reporting the following:

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

It will interesting to see if these journalists shed light on the future of environmental writing and journalism.

Click the link below to see the full story:
Reporters put Twitter, Facebook to ‘Big Brother’ test

So first check out the headline on this piece of environmental writing from the archives on the New York Times: “Waterways, Waste, and Words. Polluters’ Activities Obscured by Muddy Phrases.” And then, check out the date: October 20, 1968. Wow! Some things never change. Here’s the quote the kills me:

…euphemisms are sometimes used to camoflauge unpleasant facts, lulling the public into a false sense of security

Well, fast forward 40 years and that’s still true: The polluters are still trying to lull the public into complacency by hiding the ugly truth behind jargon and euphemisms. They can get away with anything they can paint in abstractly scientific terms. But now, there’s a whole generation of nature protection and pollution control professionals who have been trained in natural sciences rather than social sciences – and we’re lulling the public into complacency ourselves, totally by accident!