What will set the best 21C media professionals apart from the pack?

This UQ School of Journalism and Communication course blog is the output of undergraduate students developing a method and report format for presenting evaluations of online social media tools for 21C media professionals.

Media professions are changing

• The old news is that the Internet, and especially the produsage of social media, are challenging traditional media and journalism. The Economist’s “Bulletins from the Future” is a good summary, but it is also already a year old.
• Gideon Lichfield argues that the siloed news ‘beat’ is has fallen. Modern news and modern problems are ‘wicked’, and, as such, require pattern analysis.  On elephants, obsessions and wicked problems: A new phenomenology of news.
• Both the Automated Insights and Narrative Science have developed software that gives the least skilled or first pass work of the newsroom to computers. See media stories about Automated Insight and Media stories about Narrative Science. And not even the paparazzi are safe: roborazzi is an experimental autonomous wheeled imaging robot and flying imaging drones are moving towards autonomy.

Reflective practitioners

The central position of the course is that the changing nature of the media profession requires reflective practitioners who are willing to be challenged.

• Reflective practitioners have a strong foundation in traditional media values, requirements, and goals, but seek creative challanges.
• Reflective practitioners continually seek out and evaluate the latest production tools and trends with regard to developments in both industry and academia.
• Reflective practitioners share their evaluations and invite comment, to improve the field as a whole.

Reports

The tools we are interested in this semester are online services that might be used to search or find patterns in social media services. At this stage, the reports only cover Twitter tools in three areas: trends/breaking news, sentiment analysis, and image search/visual culture.

Each report consists of:

• An Evaluative report about the tool as follows:
  • Description
  • How-to instructions
  • Analysis of affordances and constraints, pros and cons
  • Summary of its value according to journalistic research and production
• An example written using the tool, in the style of one of the following:
  • Hard/breaking news
  • News analysis
  • op-ed piece

The reports are currently in the following categories:

• All reports
• Featured reports
• Featured Twitter reports
• Reports on Twitter trends/breaking news tools
• Reports on Twitter sentiment analysis tools
• Reports on Twitter image search/visual culture tools

An earlier assignment covered Storify. Links to Featured Storify reports will be available in the future.

All reports and this blog are a work in progress. We hope that you find them useful and we invite your comments.