That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent considers why it is that some words have wider implications than others.
The speakers included Simon Bucks, Associate Editor of Sky News, and Rob Kirk, a York alumnus (History, class of ‘68) who currently manages in-house editorial training, relations with universities, and the development of young journalistic talent for Sky News. In these situations, the occasionally petty rivalry between media outlets becomes irrelevant: before the professionals we are all but students hoping to make it in the Real World.
Sky News, if it needed any more publicity, certainly secured a giant plug this evening – covering the past, present and future of the media in general and Sky in particular. In order to illustrate the way news is currently reported, Kirk showed a video-reconstruction of the reporting of last year’s earthquake; cue to usual technical problems as VT initially fails to launch: “this is when they tell you ‘to fill’” Kirk jokingly explains.
Incidentally, The Yorker was amongst the first to report this story, beating the BBC!
Beyond the usual our-graduates-and-interns-stand-out-through-their-experience-and-initiative disclaimer and the short journalists-are-stubborn-persevere-and-you’ll-come-through pep talk, Bucks and Kirk tackled the heart of the matter: What kind of future lies ahead for the media? With a focus on TV, Bucks identified the two key issues: the 2012 analogue switch-off and the financial hardships faced by channels such as ITV and local newspapers. He predicted that with the convergence of TV and internet, regulation will become impossible and that with the increasing importance of the web, we will witness the precedence of aggregators.
The question that is most preoccupying, however, concerns the financial future of the media. Indeed, the rising costs of print and decreasing interest in print media combined with the fact that there is very little money to be made through internet advertising beg the question of who will pay, and what for? No one would ever even think of paying to access news on the internet – small charges for niche-markets such as The Financial Times are plausible, but beyond this, it is simply not culturally understood.
This neatly tied in with a talk given by Jimmy Leach at a Media Day held by the NUS in London last October. Leach opened by prophesying the death of print. I gloated in satisfaction at being part of The Yorker, fully independent, financially solvent, a not-for-profit organisation. I took a look around the room at the horrified faces of fellow student-journalists, as Leach cited statistics till death ensued.
Clearly spelling out the greatest revolution since the printing press itself, Leach highlighted the need for a realignment of publishing priorities, the changing attitude to users and the shift toward user-generated-content (what the cool kids call UGC). Of course, there are some negative implications to statistics-driven content. The ever-changing mediascape, while it opens vistas of information, simultaneously allows for tailored content meaning that, to a certain extent, one can remain blissfully ignorant of news one is not interested in...
Enter, new and improved Apathy 2.0, Exeunt widened horizons. After all, the medium is the message.
As a literature student I remain highly sceptical at the thought that the online medium will ever fully replace – displace? - the “printed” word.
My personal preferences and habits mean little, obviously, but I always draft essays, poems and blogs by hand. There’s nothing quite like holding a pen and scribbling excitedly on the spiralled 70p notepad in a café feeling like the next <insert name of author who sums up your literary/journalistic aspirations here>. What’s more, I hate, repeat, hate, reading articles on JSTOR on a computer screen, and with a guilty thought for the environment print two pages per page double sidedly.
I love, repeat, love, carrying The Guardian under my arm, walking about campus looking mildly intellectual.
I love, repeat, love, carrying The Guardian under my arm, walking about campus looking mildly intellectual. But it is not for the “news” that I fork out 30p – it’s for G2, the Sudoku, the features, the “quick” crossword. And let’s face it – 30p buys you that air of intellectualism which we, as students, specialise in craving. For actual news, I’d rather passively watch TV, taking in images of war and parliamentary nothingness alike, listen to the radio, or more realistically, look it up online.
For 30p, what do we buy? In our increasingly mediated society information pervades all: no one learnt that Obama reached electoral victory in the papers – it was online, it was out there before any print journalist put pen to paper, or set finger to keyboard. That’s right: the medium is the message.
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