Digital Journalism

Following on from week nine's reading, here is a link to another article of interest by Christopher Harper - Doing it all - covers the topic of digital journalism and the resources, or lack thereof, that media companies devote to online versions of their newspapers.
http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=398

Machinima

Found an interesting interview with some of the technical crew from South Park regarding a machinima inspired episode invloving the MMOG World of Warcraft.

"Make Love, Not Warcraft" - http://www.machinima.com/article/view&id=459

Engaging Media - Week Nine

Reading for this week...

Journalism in a Digital Age - Christopher Harper

The media plays a specific role in ‘agenda setting’ in so far as having the power to “emphasize specific events, ideas and social values”. The media also deliberately “frames” the news so as to be interpreted in specific ways by the public.

Harper does not see the internet / www as having the same power to “set the agenda” largely because the audience is too small and the broadcasters that own the websites are still setting the agenda.

Online journalism is altering the traditional role of the journalist. Firstly by placing far more power in the hands of the reader and secondly through allowing the journalist access to a wide variety of new technology to tell their story e.g. audio and video.

Online journalism audience is increasing but is still quite small compared to other forms of news media. There is a trend for users to use the web for quick snippets of news and headline stories.

Clear division in internet usage based on age - older users more interested in following the news, particularly on a daily basis.

According to Michael Kolowich (http://www.newsedge.com/), people are turning to online services for several key reasons:
1. News consumers want filtering
2. The ability to search for news is important
3. Browsing
4. Communing

Journalists divided into three groups:
1. Benevolent revolutionaries - enthusiastic about new technologies
2. Nervous traditionalists - the opposite of the above
3. Serene separatists - do not fear new technology as they do not see it having a great impact upon their profession

As classified advertising becomes increasingly online-based as opposed to print-based, some traditional printed newspapers will likely go out of business. This revenue is crucial for a newspaper’s survival.

Related Links...

Murdoch to charge for online news - http://www.theage.com.au/technology/biz-tech/not-happy-rupert-readers-say-they-wont-pay-for-online-news-20090807-eco0.html

Fairfax losses and plans to form consortium to charge for online news - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,,25975971-643,00.html

Some advice to Fairfax from Crikey - http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/08/24/crikey-says-70/

Engaging Media - Week Eight

Reading for this week...



Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in video game culture - Sarah Colman and Nick Dyer-Witheford

Examines the concept of a media commons and how that operates against a global backdrop of information capitalism.

Commons - “resources that all in a specified community may use, but none can own”. Contrasts directly with a commodity and has no profit agenda.

Commons concept is popular with those that buck against the trend of capitalism and corporate globalisation and has grown alongside the growth of new media.

Anti-piracy laws are breeding new resistance from those who resent the financial cost and cost to system performance that anti-copying technology brings.

Element of “unavoidable co-existence” between game pirates and the game industry.

Modding - generating new forms of game production and expanding current games, builds on the concept of hacking and “digital tinkering”. Gained popularity in the 1990s. Excellent example is the adaptation of Half- Life to create Counter-Strike. Mods are circulated free of charge and are welcome to some extent by the game industry as they generate publicity.

Machinima - adapting games to create movies, a concept that is developing rapidly as computer hardware and software becomes increasingly sophisticated.

Both modding and machinima “represent a return of the digital ‘DIY’ practices at the root of game culture” and serve to re-purpose games for collective use.

MMOGS - Massively-Multiplayer Online Games. Follow on from MUDS (Multi-User Domains) and essentially create a synthetic game world in which thousands can interact. MMOGS represent a shift from commons to commodity and usually entail both initial outlay and ongoing expense for the player e.g. World of Warcraft nets its developer Blizzard $1.5 billion annually. MMOGS have their own behaviour patterns and social rules and largely fail or succeed based on the vibrancy of the player community. Players may not own them, but the direction of MMOGS is very much determined by the consumer.

MMOGS have led to practice of virtual trading, in which useful objects within the game are traded in real life for actual currency. “Virtual trading shows how paradoxically intertwined commons and commodities have become”.

We live in an era of multi-dimensional media in which the roles of creator and consumer are blurred. This is apparent in the world of digital game play, where the defining feature is interactivity and the consumer very much shapes the game and determines its success.

Remediation Project - Reflective Essay

My essay outline is basically to discuss the process and aim of my remediation, how changing the text from a TV series to a series of newspaper articles altered the roles of the different media 'actors' that I had identified in assignment one and how the finished product impacted upon the meaning of the text and its reception.

I write about some of the differences between the two mediums of television and newspaper and make reference to McLuhan's concept of "hot" and "cool" media and the challenge of adapting a product made for a medium that is highly collaborative, multi-layered and visceral and successfully remediating it into a medium that is quite singular, independent and focused on information needs rather than entertainment needs.

Remediation Project

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media

Published in 1964, McLuhan's well-known study of media theory provides some useful information for my remediation project. Specifically, McLuhan's concept of hot and cool media.

Television is a "cool" medium, requiring greater user participation. The viewer must actively involve all their senses for viewing television is a highly sensory experience. Print media, including newspapers, are what McLuhan referred to as a "hot" medium. Newspapers may offer the user large amounts of information, but at a low sensory level with less user participation required.

One of the major challenges in my remediation was to try and foster a high level of sustained involvement in a medium that is primarily passive. How to adapt a television series into a series of newspaper articles and still maintain user interest? I tried to achieve this by adapting the major storylines from the series that would have an element of sensation and would grab the attention of the reader. I would try to capture with words what the television series would capture with graphic images, dialogue and music.

Engaging Media - Week Seven

Reading for this week...
Alternate reality gaming and the convergence culture: The case of Alias
Henrik Ornebring



Alternate reality gaming (ARGs) - "a form of internet-based mystery game in which participants are immersed in a fictional world and engage in collective problem-solving". There is a group mentaility to this type of gaming with the puzzle being impossible to solve through solo effort.

ARGs are becoming quite common and started with The Beast released in 2001 to coincide with the release of the film A.I. In this article Ornebring focuses on the game associated with the TV series Alias, of which there have been three.

ARGs are an excellent example of cross-media promotion or media convergence - the game feeds off the TV show/film which then also may feed off the success of the game.

Jenkins highlights The Matrix as signalling a shift to more active participation. Old Hollywood relied on redundancy and did not challenge the viewer. New Hollywood requires a greater attention span from the viewer and even the need for the viewer to do research.

Ornebring argues that convergence culture doesn't necessarily dissolve boundaries between media but "creates new opportunities to market a specific text or set of texts...through other texts".

ARGs blur the boundaries between the roles of producer and consumer, creating the prosumer and a more participatory culture.

Ornebring is however, critical of the little attention given to ARGs as marketing tools and examples of viral marketing or buzz marketing. Those critical of ARGs may see them not as new opportunities for interactivity but just as marketing tools to build a brand.

Fan-cultural production - fan fiction, fan videos etc, otherwise seen as kind of "cultural labour". It is highly active and highly engaged consumer culture.

Alias ARGs are examples of both corporate convergence and grassroots convergence as the first two games were prodcued by the corporate media and the other example was produced by fans.

There are differences between the industry-prodcued and fan-produced Alias ARGs, for example the former gave no additional backstory whereas the latter focused strongly on backstory. However, Ornebring believes that "despite their differences, commercial and non-commercial ARGs based on existing media properties still follow a similar logic of fan consumption". They perform the same cultural function - "extending the narrative of an existing media property in ways that conform to corporate goals of marketing and brand-building
as well as fan audiences’ goals of pleasurable consumption."

Engaging Media - Week Six

Readings for this week...
Recovering Fair Use - Steve Collins
Boulevard of Broken Songs - Em McEvan

Well I’ve been discovering the world of mash-ups since reading the Boulevard of Broken Songs and can see how people get sucked into spending large amounts of time cruising YouTube.

I would agree with the comment that “mash-up artists take a common popular culture and appropriate it for their own desires and creative impulses” and this really appeals to me. I would also highlight how mash-ups are quite often used for satirical purposes or as a social commentary tool. My brother-in-law drew my attention to the enormous number of mash-ups on YouTube based around the 2004 German film Downfall, a film about Adolf Hitler’s last days. There are a number of mash-ups that take this film as their basis and apply modern-day political events and characters including British PM Gordon Brown, US President Barack Obama and the European Elections. I particularly like one that takes a terrific scene from Downfall and re-writes the subtitles to portray Gordon Brown’s reaction to a disastrous election result in Glasgow - my brother-in-law is from Glasgow so he was very keen to show me this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4n--IXg6HY - Not for kids. Very bad language in this one.

I just really like the creative practice of combining different elements to produce something unexpected or something with a deeper commentary. I guess mash-ups are a perfect example of Web 2.0 technologies at work and the essential Web 2.0 philosophy of enhanced creativity and collaboration and the development of web-based communities and social networking tools.

I quite liked this blog that I found when I was doing a little more reading on the subject -
The Synthetic Librarian -http://syntheticlibrarian.com/2009/07/30/mashup-sharing-little-mashups-have-big-value-when-you-share-them-like-social-media

Obviously the subject ties in well with our other reading for the week Recovering Fair Use. Mash-ups are clearly a great example of prosumerism at work. Copyright and the concept of fair use have always been difficult areas but the rise of Web 2.0 and associated technologies are obviously taking the issue to a completely new level. The laws involving this sort of user-generated content must be complex and undoubtedly need to evolve to keep pace with the popularity of the technology. There has to be some protection but I tend to agree with the idea that Collins puts forward “that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy”.