On the 10th of November we had someone to talk to us who made me quite star struck. Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC’s technology correspondent and I not only recognised him immediately but his voice was unmistakeable. I remember sitting and listening to him with my grandparents while they nattered about how much technology was advancing and how they were never going to be able to keep up (now not only do they know how to text but they also have a laptop and have successfully sent two emails to date much to their surprise… and everyone elses).
So yes, we were told the day before that we were having a change to the schedule and Rory would be in to talk to us Tuesday afternoon in the lecture hall which made everyone rather excited. So in the afternoon we made our way to the lecture where Rory and our lecturer Glynn were waiting for us. Before we had much of a chance to settle we were told to all smile and wave not really knowing why only to discover this was posted on twitter later on:
I wasn’t looking too great that day because I was feeling ill so I’m pretty grateful I’m at the back hidden!
All in all I found the lecture extremely interesting. Not only is he a very witty man, but he was so ahead of his time in 2008 that the powerpoint presentation he showed us from last year was still completely relevant in 2009, even with the speed at which technology is changing. He started off with the sheer number of people who were often seen hustling and bustling around newsrooms in 1983 when he started at the BBC including producers, reporters, editors and craftsmen including people involved with the cameras, sound, lights, engineers and film editors. The audience in the 1980′s was also very different to the audience we have today. Firstly the news brought in HUGE numbers because terrestrial TV was all people had to watch, there was no Sky and no online TV channels where people could get news anytime of the day. The audience were also pretty ignored. There was no way for them to get in touch with newsrooms such as email, text or comments via the web. Rory even told a very funny story about someone who had once called into the studio with everyone finding it hysterical – calling the person mad.
The landscape today of course is very different. There are now hundreds of channels people can watch, 24 hour news and online news while papers are in retreat and jobs for journalists are quickly disappearing. The audience is also very different with User Generated Content becoming a part of every journalists day to day life. The audience are very much involved and active and more and more raw footage of events is being filmed by so-called ‘citizen journalists’ enabling a story to gather momentum more quickly compared with the 1980′s when a camera crew made up of about 10 people would have to rush to get to a breaking news story as quickly as possible.
He ended the lecture with the ideal journalist for 2009. We have to be multi skilled, interactive with our audience, both a lone wolf and a team player and we have to be willing to be poor.
I’m not looking forward to the poor part…
However my favourite part of the whole lecture was this quote: “Twitter is a platform for news.” This could not be more true. I find out most things these days from twitter because I see it as a trending topic. The Ballon Boy scandal, I found out about that over twitter, as well as the ABC/ Adam Lambert debacle.
Twitter is a way for us to get our voice out into the world. It connects us with people all over the world. People we would never usually talk to. Rory himself told us about how he’d searched for an elderly person to help with a report on computers he was doing over twitter!
I <3 Twitter
So… talking about Twitter this is my niche section of my blog. The trending topics bit! So today there are lots of different topics that are currently trending. Yesterday the number one tweet all day was #happybirthdaymiley for everyone to wish Miley Cyrus a happy birthday.
However, today the top spots were taken by Adam Lambert and ABC with the number one trending topic for the day being #ShameOnYouABC. When I logged on to Twitter I had no idea what this was talking about until I goggled it and found out that Adam Lambert’s performance on ABC’s Good Morning show was cancelled. Although no official reason has been given, the majority of people claim that it is due to his performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday night. Although ABC has not given a reason for the cancellation it seems that the twittersphere is going crazy with people showing their disapproval for what they assume is a backlash of Lambert’s AMA performance.
Another trending topic is Black Friday. This is the Friday after Thanksgiving and is considered the start of the Christmas shopping season. Lots of different stores in the States have sales on and it is considered the busiest shopping day of the year with fights even breaking out between people competing to get the best bargains. I once saw a fight between two women in work, over a £15 dress. They ended up being banned from the store for life…. Is a dress that has 50% off really worth being banned from a chain of shops for life?!
Until next time bloggers…
