During the semester I’ve enjoyed the most of the topics we have examined in the class and well-informed about the many aspects of the digital world. The every single topic was quite challenging for me and my journalistic development.

As a result of having a print journalism background in my professional life,  I didn’t not realize how much I have missed about digital world. Despite I had a chance to work on online journalism long time ago; I’ve preferred to stay in the newspaper.

Today, I do not have any regret not to change my decision because I don’t believe there are rigid distinctions between online, print, radio and broadcast journalism. The purposes, rules and methods are almost similar. Only difference is where the journalism being applied physically; on the screen, monitor or paper.

However I have been defending that there should be a difference exposition between “journalistic work” and “non-journalistic work” in digital world, among blogs and web sites. I believe that the every single information or comments we have been seeing on the blogs can’t contain a news value. We can not assume that every blog or web site which has journalistic manners is credible for newsworthiness, liability, accountability. 

On the other hand I also have been defending that a journalist should be aware of everything in digital world because no matter what this is the future. I was trying to refuse this point before  I took this class. Now I’ve faced how much powerful and real the digital world is. We can not watch this big era from a distance…

THANK YOU ALL!  

LET’S KEEP ON BLOGGINGGG:))

“An amazing thing happened in the presidential contest of 2004: For the first time in my life, maybe the first time in history, a candidate lost but his campaign won.”

                  (Joe Trippi, The Revolution will not be Televised)

What Joe Trippi trying to say when he emphasizes Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign in 2003? “A candidate lost but his campaign won”.

The Dean’s campaign started with seven people in the campaign staff, $100.000 in the bank and four hundred thirty two supporters. At the end of 2003, almost in a year, Dean’s campaign ended with $50 million fundraising (from small donations $100 or less) and 640, 000 supporters. However it wasn’t enough for him to be the President of United States.

As Trippi says end of his book’s introduction one of the most essential results of this campaign is that it was the story how American people engage in real dialogue. Dislike other political campaigns in the past; this campaign stopped “selling” to them. This time the platform where the parties meet was different: Internet.

The aspects, interactivity and social networking have made internet a convenient place to give voice to voiceless, to share, to talk and to access information. It is not all about how much technology emerged in 21^st century. I believe that if you don’t use the internet primarily for public’s favor (not only being accessible but also being questionable), you will not be accomplishing anyway neither as a businessman nor a politician.  

TVs and radios haven’t given us a chance to show our reactions and express our opinions about what we’ve considered most. We were just listening and watching in the past but now we have been getting a part of the conversation. We have started to make our preferences on the internet easily and quickly.  For instance online buying, selling, searching, watching, networking, mailing, discussing, surveying, talking, reading…etc.

As we realize almost everything what we were doing manually before the internet came into our lives, has been getting ONLINE.

In this sense why we don’t think about “online democracy“?  As long as we maintain and encourage democracy on the internet we will be eligible to apply democracy among grassroots. The transformation from “TV society” to “Internet society” has been emerging increasingly. The internet will reach everyone in the world eventually. Thus why we don’t launch revolution on internet in favor of democracy?  

I think Howard Dean’s campaign was launched with this belief and has devoted itself to power of democracy. Alike Dean says: “To really use the Internet well, you have to build community, not just enable fundraising.”

In my opinion whoever adopts this mentality would be successful in the future like Howard Dean and Joe Trippi. 

According to Facebook, more than 1,600 contenders for national and state offices have created profiles.

“The very technology that has transformed the global economy has transformed the campaign process as well, so that the race will be run as much on the World Wide Web as in union halls and town squares and on television. ”

From the introduction of “The First Campaign” , Garrett Graff

This statement explains why we have been facing with the First Campaign. It is quite hard to make further comment on the book because  The First Campaign pictures whole journey how technological and political developments emerged synchronously in the last decade.

Today we have been watching political debates on TV where politicians were asked various and spontaneous questions by people because of YouTube. Today also people are invited to vote almost for everything.

As we have been examining during our class online media tools; blogs, social networking platforms, online campaigning and many other ways on World Wide Web are vital as new communication channels to say your word to people not only in your neighborhood but also to the world. This is the biggest consequences of globalization and technological revolution in today’s world. The thousand, millions of people are brought together to demonstrate their voices with only one SMS massage today.

The people are not voting only for political candidates’ appearances on TV but also they consider how much candidates response their crucial manners in their conversation and how much let people to make contributions to the conversation. As a result of that politicians have been realizing the power of the conversational communication with the society. Therefore they turn their head towards online fund-raising campaigns.

We all are aware how Howard Dean’s fund-raising campaign had been successfully accomplished. Dean’s campaign has raised $ 50 million and funds came largely in small donations over the Internet, the average overall donation size was under $100. Suchlike fund-raising has happened first time ever in political campaigning in the US history. This is an ultimate example of how much internet can be efficient in even political campaigning.

“The First Campaign” gives us the very interesting evidences about how the way of social and political communication and sharing was transformed by maximum usage of technology. On the other hand I agree that using of new technologies is not the only indicator to determine whether you’ll be successful or not. The question is how your tune is while you are reaching people through technology. Are you allowing people to join the conversation or wanting only their votes? What is your language in this sense? Monologue or conversation?

According to “The First Campaign”:

*In the fifth-season finale of Fox TV’s American Idol talent show, more people voted for singer Taylor Hicks than have ever voted for a presidential candidate in any U.S election.

*The candidates have profile on Facebook.com, the social-networking website targeted at collage students. A Facebook group for Barack Obama swelled to a quarter million people in less than a month, and when Hillary Clinton went onto Yahoo!

*By the end of May 2007, ABCPAC, the conservative fund-raising site equivalent to the left’s ActBlue, had raised only $385 for all GOP field. Meanwhile, ActBlue which draws upon the larger more organized and powerful progressive blogosphere, had raised more than $3 million for John Edwards alone, and total of some $22 million in online donations since its 2004 lunch.

Mike’s post, TRUTHINESS AND KILLING OFF OF ALL JOURNALISTS, contains various perspectives which I do and don’t agree with. Obviously media industry has been getting more competitive than ever and person who devotes his/her life to be a journalist suffers both morally and financially. This is a professional that you need to wait your day to break in. Unfortunately journalism is ungrateful for many years for high percentage of media workers. Like an artists, painters, sculptors. Also this is true as Mike says: “The resumes read Brown, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, University of Chicago, etc. Journalists, for the most part, are the sons of doctors and lawyers, the brothers and sisters of stock traders and economists. They fill any individual family’s public service quota. The journalists are among the elite, and if they are not, they soon assume that role.”

This is same all around the world. Alike in my country we have dozens of Journalism Schools in Turkey but graduates work mostly in unrelated work places. Personally I was lucky because I started to work in the field when I was a freshman in collage. Elitism is everywhere. You have to be marketable and well-labeled to be able to get this job. Otherwise you can’t compete with these sons of doctors and lawyers, the brothers and sisters of stock tradersJ)

On the other hand I don’t know why is Journalism so attractive to them? Is that related to money matters or ego satisfaction? I’ve made little research on Google (I still strongly believe that Google is more beneficial and reliable tool for journalist than Wikipedia. Therefore I don’t agree with you Mike at this point) and I found an interesting report on Radio and Television Salary Survey conducted by Ball State University.

I don’t know how much they earn particularly because there is a huge salary cliff between news reporters and anchors. Probably these elitist journalists rather want to be an anchor with the help of their influential affiliations and pedigrees.

Let’s change the topic. I would like to talk about Mike’s point that I can’t agree with. He says: “Then I started thinking about who the historians are – mainly journalists and or academics who all have their own biases. This is not original thinking on my part at all, but I suddenly realized why academics and journalists feel so threatened by the site. It renders them less important. It gives anyone and everyone the ability to not only write history, but to judge it, analyze it, edit it, protest it, manipulate it and emphasize it, just like they do. Journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of all information, and subtle references in their nut graphs (usually the second or third paragraph in the story that explains background and why this story is important) are no longer the accepted background on any given story. The real nut graphs are floating around for everyone and anyone to read.”

He gives examples from Washington Post and New York Times such as Walter Reed Story and other political news. Then he comes with the idea of Wikipedia and tries to approve its preciousness for individuals. He doesn’t give credit to newspapers as much as Wikipedia. I couldn’t understand this point clearly. How could we compare Wikipedia and grassroots media under the terms of telling the truth or doing journalism? They are like apple and pearl to compare. I’m not claiming that media is not questionable. Obviously we are part of this industry and we have a priority to judge it. However we can’t sacrifice whole grassroots media mercilessly for newborn-attractive media figure which is still need to have wide acceptance from all society in the world.

  ”Have blogs been getting an instrument of propaganda?”

I really liked Jo’s open-minded comment in her “Iraq on the web” post. She summarizes not only interesting sides of these blogs but also concealed and worrying parts of war-related videos on these blogs. She thinks that some of the videos by soldiers don’t look like credential and adds:  “In some ways they seem like recruiting propaganda rather than a window into what the war is like for soldiers.”

Back to Jo’s comment about propaganda I’ve made little research on that. In December 2005, The New York Times published an article about the blogs are written by soldiers. (Source:  Wikipedia )

Today we can’t deny blogs’s emerging impact among informative media tools. Many people interested in what soldiers have been doing in their daily lives, which tactics have been used while fighting, how can they survive or how is war atmosphere? The blogs give much more details and variety of sources than print and broadcast media for sure.

Therefore we need to make decision between what we want to know and how much we need to know more. Otherwise we would have a problem with trustworthiness which is one of the biggest problematic issues of our information age.

Furthermore are we questioning how these blogs’s tunes are? Are they becoming propaganda model likewise advertisements and public relations techniques in the past? I think we can not see the whole picture without asking these questions.

Truly blogs have brought more conversation and share to Web World but we need to have our own filter in order to get credible and worthy information among these hundreds blogs.

There are bunch of anti-war and supportive-war blogs on Iraq War. I have linked them on my previous blog entry, titled “Real Time Wars.” You can find extended list of Iraq War blogs here Yahoo Directory.

 The Persian Gulf War was my first televised war. In January 17, 1991, CNN launched reporting from the Gulf. Meanwhile I was 12 years old and first time in my life I was witnessing the term of “Live War”. Every single day we were watching Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw as others in all around the world. It was quite influential war for my generation because we had never seen the war before this much transparently.

Nearly 10 years later I wrote my graduation thesis on “The War on Journalism“. How about that? I always think that this is most crucial and uneasy part of journalism. Besides difficulties to gather information under the war conditions you put your life at risk to cover the story. What motives encourage journalist for doing this?

In the collage during my journalism classes what I was thought that there is no particularly Journalist for “War” because Journalists can not be part of the war.

They can’t support wars in order to get more “FAME” or “RATING“. They just report what they have seen and witnessed. However it is always hard to determine fine line between “Doing your job” and “Helping wounded people”.

Reporting America at War is a documentary where we can find chronological development of war reporting and also how the way of reporting has changed in the years. Moreover we can remind what were the most essential rules and characteristics of journalism in the era of war. 

16 years after first heavily-televised war, how much media changed? A lot…Technology has emerged incredibly and now we are not satisfied with televised war anymore. We need to know more and more because we have a power to do that. Altough we have real-time reporting now it isn’t enough because this time we want to get different opinions from different sources. How about real-sources such as real Iraqis? What does it mean real Iraqis? Only Iraqis can pursue us what is really going on there. Isn’t that transformation of news to reality shows? Do we have any expectations like that? If answer is yes why we need a journalist? Did Journalists lose their credibilities?

Journalism essentially requires seeking truth and public enlightenment. In order to do that journalists have to keep neutrality, objectivity, newsworthiness, and minimize harm as much as possible.

If we assume that everything meets with these conditions listed above “Why War on the Web” is so controversial as a new reporting way. Kevin Sites and Blogging Controversy is a key case on that issue. He is long-time experienced veteran war correspondent but he was told to shut down his popular site because he was not legitimate enough.

If we want professional journalist in the field what disturbs us? I think this is not completely related with his journalism skills. The reason of controversy is BLOGGING. Blogging is still suspicious and illegitimate among the majority of journalists and journalism scholars. Paul Grabowicz, the new media program director of Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley criticizes unedited war blogs and adds: “We are getting into some treacherous water here. If there is not an editor reading before it goes up, it is taking away a safeguard that’s sensible one in journalism-to make sure you get it right before it’s published”. MEDIA: Web logs offer stream of consciousness from the front

Moreover blogging on war not just done by experienced journalist but also students, soldiers, individuals (Iraqis, Americans) as a nature of blogging. You can find wide list of Iraq War Blogs here. Iraq Today

Some war bloggers says that “Only two things we need to have are laptop and satellite phone. We don’t need an editor”.  I think this is the point what we really need to consider it. That is why we can’t count on any bloggers as a journalist. Bloggers also tends to use more casual style of writing. How we can evaluate facts? Is this is a real story or just make up? 

In the sum of these conceptions the answer of “Is seeing and reading about war good thing or bad thing?” question would be “Good Thing” without any doubt. This is amazingly important for public enlightenment; encouraging freedom of speech and press. People can express their feelings and opinions as an opponent of war or supporter of war. We should not have any problem with this part of the contention.

On the other hand  if we are considering every-war related blogs like an example of journalism the answer will be big “NO”.  We do have already enough disinformation in today’s world. People can be deceived through propaganda channels, defemations and inaccurate information. I think how much we are reading or seeing on war is not critical issue at this point. On the contrary I believe we need to determine whether every writings or videos on war has a journalistic value.   

What a girl…There are so many things in Jessica’s entries. Creative thinking, fair criticism, fun, life, sensation, nostalgia…I like her style because she writes like she talks and catches my attention easily. She is also persuasive because she provides the facts accurately and dauntlessly. I do completely agree with her comments about Wikipedia-Truhtiness dilemma, I’m fascinated with Jessica’s approach to the issue. Let’s remember what she wrote in her entry, The Trouble with Truthiness.

 ”My problem with Wikipedia’s devotion to truthiness is that it values heart over fact. It favors what one dream as oppose to what one sees. That’s dangerous because the heart is too abstract to qualify. It’s impulsive. Facts, on the other hand, are tangible and retraceable. “
I would like to extend the controversy. Thus heart is too abstract to qualify; we can’t prevent subjective and relative information that place in Wikipedia anyway. We have already seen that on Wikiscanner projects. Institutions, companies, people who have some affiliations with them do not hesitate to be supplier of TRUTHINESS.

I do not mean that we have to have kind of dictatorship or censorship to rule on every article we’ve entered or edited. Of course I do not. Wikipedia can remain as an alternate and easy way to reach at practical data-base but it can’t impose like an objective and neutral source.

Moreover this is why newspapers, encyclopedias exits. We need to trust them. Otherwise truthiness term will terminate everything we used to know before. This might seem as an exaggerated chaotic picture but if we do not support grassroots media as much as new media tools I have a sense that we will experience this in early future.

Ok understandable. The both new media tools and grassroots media have pros and cons. Technology has made new media tools more accessible and easier than others. This is not enough to answer my question. How about evaluation, confirmation, news worthiness? I am not talking about seeking truth because in this case it is not that much easy to find what the truth is.

Let’s go back to Jessica’s comment again.
“To say that George Washington did not own slaves is a blatant lie. Of course he did. An infinite number of American white men of means living during the 17th and 18th centuries owned slaves. No offense to wikiality (though that’s a really adorable nick name), but that was reality. It’s not a comfortable reality to recall, but it is reality nonetheless. In denying that, one denies American History as well. More, if facts about slavery can be erased, so can facts about the Holocaust, the Iraq War death toll and Janjaweed militia attacks. Everything becomes subject to web user whim and/or discomfort. That scares me. “

As she pointed out denying, refurbishing, imposing, propaganda were not easy that much before Wikipedia. Frankly we are forced to accept wikipedia as an ideal way to learn. I don’t have to applaud EVERYTHING that new media brings to our lives.