Goodbye my Chechnya

This photo story is about the Islamic town of Chechnya, struggles with poverty and other hardships and their remaining hope can be seen through these images.






More fantasticness can be seen here:
http://www.foto8.com/new/online/photo-stories/1568-goodbye-my-chechnya

Week 12

This lecture was an introduction into the concept of investigative journalism. I find this aspect of journalism quite exciting and if I were to pursue a career in the industry it would definitely be within this field. This is because investigative journalism is a super powerful tool and, when manipulated correctly, it can enlighten and spark change. My favourite investigative journalism is definitely not that of say, current affair, which pains me to even call journalism, but of real stories such as the young Indonesian boy imprisoned in an Australian adult prison of whom has been sent home since the investigations of Hamish Mcdonald brought the issue to the public's attention. I also believe that revolution of online journalism is placing pressure on this aspect of the industry. This is elaborated on in the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TL1vEzzBRY

Lecture Ten: Week 11

This lecture surrounded the topic of agenda setting, which can be defined as "how the media constructs reality". It covered the four subdivisions of: Public Agenda, Policy Agenda, Corporate Agenda and Media Agenda and the general concept of agenda setting, including the Agenda Setting Family:

1. Media Gatekeeping
2. Media Advocacy
3. Agenda Cutting
4. Agenda Surfing
5. The diffusion of News
6. Portrayal of an Issue
7. Media Dependence

I don't really have a particular view on agenda setting and see it more of an inevitable aspect of the media. A recent case of agenda setting would be the highly publicised case of the Italian children and their mother.

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-04182000-13220003/unrestricted/jdeCOMPLETEetd.pdf


The pdf link above takes an analytical view on the issue of agenda setting and tries to apply strategic thinking to the outcome of setting certain agendas such as political, sport, etcetera and is really quite interesting.

The Pain in Spain

http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/the-pain-in-spain/260/
This article written by Eric Ellis I found whilst scanning the Global Mail is about the current economic situation in Spain and thus caught my eye as next year I plan to live and volunteer in Spain for a while. It is well written and is equipped with some fantastic photojournalism by Simon Bruty, as seen below. Worth a read.

Week Nine

This weeks topic surrounded the concept of News Values. News values being, to steal a quote from the slides, "The degree of prominence 

a media outlet gives to a 

story, and the attention that 

is paid by an audience."

To elaborate upon this quote, I'll add another by Kurt Loder, also from the slides: 

‘news is anything that's interesting, that relates 

to what's happening in the world, what's 

happening in areas of the culture that would be 

of interest to your audience.’

As I've probably said in previous entries, I believe News Values are becoming quite inverse. By that I mean superfluous tabloid type information is becoming the most read information. This is linked to Loder's quote as it inexplicitly says that we as a culture are becoming increasingly self centred and superficial and thus so is our news. This of course isn't entirely true as there are still very much watched stations such as ABC News and SBS World News, though I do think it is true enough to be worth thinking about and how we can reverse this.