Tuesday, September 29, 2009

FBI WHY?

I wanted to transition over the Facebook this week partly because it has gigantic implications for the legacy journalists we were talking about last night, but also because the topic is so big that we may need other sessions to work on it.
In fact, our "what is a journalist" talk from last night would reverberate with this formuer publisher learning new tricks.

One thing we can rely on is that just about every day some new piece of journalism comes out about Facebook. And those stories will create other stories.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Victor's use of FB and Twitter to generate support for a cause is pretty cool. He generated enough awareness to bring in some media support, which in turn generates awareness. This is great. Historically, generating awareness for social and charitable causes is difficult at best, requiring large, labor-intensive fundraisers or events. He was able to cut tot he core.

Question: Though used for good, could this be a case of creating news? Probably not because closing a school is news, it just wasn't noticed first by traditional media. So can we say it's okay to use these tools for mass distribution as long as you have good intentions? Of course, who decides what are good intentions? As in the case noted by Colin concerning death threats to Obama, clearly that is an example of the tool being used for damaging purposes. Who decides and how do we police it?