With the rapid development of the Internet and new technology, a lot more sources are now available to the audiences and there are two big categories: free news online and citizen journalism.
With the rise of Internet usage, as what I've said in the previous blog entry, people do everything in front of the computer and with their Internet. Thus, some parties, including the news agencies and Internet users, perhaps me and you, have started to provide news online and have transformed the way how the traditional reporters report the news. The most popular sort of news is that the traditional newspaper agencies have created their own kind of TV news report.
Here are the two most famous ones:
Next media from Appledaily News On.cc
http://hk.nextmedia.com/ http://home.on.cc/news/
These two news agencies are famous for their videos and animation. Different from the traditional TV news report, the reports from these two agencies are a lot more casual in style: they usually report with a teasing tone and are much more entertaining. They love to criticize the people being interviewed which attract audience to have further discussion. In addition to the traditional kind of video, for Appledaily News, they even create their own animation when the video of the certain case is not available. They normally create animation with very realistic avatars. The avatars will act in different scenes where the case happened, e.g. murder, rape and etc. On the official sites of the news agencies, the videos are automatically played in a sequence which users are bombarded with a series of entertaining videos unless they stop the videos. The videos are not only published on their own official website but also on Youtube, which are very convenient for Internet users.
Undoubtedly, the videos are a lot more attractive than the traditional TV news reports. However, it is said to harm the mind, the cultural and the educational level of the audience. Base on the investigated words, the animations are created with the reporters' own imagination. Imagination in this case is no longer negative. The audience may have cultivated a bad habit to believe in those imaginations, which are not necessarily true and are very subjective.
Other than the truthfulness of the videos, the news agencies are always cross the boundaries that they have created a lot of sensational clips, including obscene and violent animations. The following video clip is a typical negative example from Taiwan:
These videos maybe fine for entertainment, but must not be a role model and learning materials for children. What we can do is to avoid believing what is reported in visual and be more critical.
Another new category of new media is citizen journalism.
As a vivid contrast to the past twenty years, audiences are no longer passive. They do not only receive news from the news reports, but also begin to produce their own news. The most common tools are blog, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Weibo. With the assistance of digital camera and the camera function embedded in mobile phones, people are allowed to record 1st hand videos, take 1st hand photos and immediately share them online. It is also a transformation of the traditional news that the citizen reporters may not be as professional as the traditional news reporters: the videos recorded are blurry and shaky; the words used are too casual and may have grammatical mistakes. Other than these, from my point of view, citizen journalism should be appreciated.
It is true that the news reported are most likely created by the professional journalists who have received professional training previously. They are taught to take the right perspective, taught to include the most exciting and sensational shots and quotes which will attract the greatest number of audience. But all these chosen shots and words may not be enough to constitute the whole picture of the news stories.
Take a look on this picture.
This is a picture posted on 9gag.com, collected by an Internet user.
What the two pictures the user would like to use them to emphasize is that the picture from the traditional media is captured from Google Maps and retouched. The streets are claimed to be crowded with a lot of protesters. But turn out, of course, it is not a real one.
What I want to say is that, with the rise of citizen journalism, the reason why we should appreciate is that there are too many loopholes we can find from the traditional media: the figures they are protecting, perhaps government officials, what citizen journalism is now doing is that they can report the news online with their own true and raw videos and texts. Perhaps the news may not be reported in a very objective tone, but the traditional news may only be framed and pretend to be very objective. With the development of new media writing, there is going to be a long wrestling between citizen journalism and traditional journalism.
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