Tag: teaching

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Buzzfeed preview: pros and cons

In our Introduction to Journalism lecture I was assigned to take a look at a particular media website (mine was Buzzfeed) and share a preview of it on my personal blog.

The name of Buzzfeed means “getting feed instantly” . The site contains stories with long, catchy headlines that are likely to appear on top of search engines. What is more, these written pieces have “to sell and not to tell”.

Viewers are encouraged to share the stories on social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Buzzfeed is mostly for entertainment and celebrity gossip, but it has a piece of seriousness too (although you cannot notice that at first sight). Advertisements are placed on the sidebar and parallel with “news”.

Its style is plain, not eye-irritating with sparkling colours, popping ads and subscriptions.  The menu line is symmetrically divided – on the left we see the name of the site and five menus and on the right- the search engine alongside with five creative fast-click buttons that lead us to new content.

BuzzFeed

This site could appeal to the younger audience- from teenagers to young adults. It has sections with recipes, politics, parenting issues and even LGBT. To put it in a nutshell, it has a bite for everyone’s taste.

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‘We need much more critical reading’, says Felix Salmon in ‘Teaching journalists to read’

Felix Salmon’s piece of writing provides some good food for thought. My first reaction when reading the headline was, ‘Can’t journalists read properly, or is there something more than meets their eye?’ . It turns out, Felix has the ability to witness the biggest problems concerning journalism:

  1. He believes that what is missing in the journalistic establishment is people who are good at finding and curating great material.

The main focus on Salmon’s speech during The Audit’s breakfast, is that the journalistic entities- newspapers, magazines, websites, have to start putting much more emphasis on reading. The reason why he emphasizes on this was because journalism is becoming much more conversational.

Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you.

2. According to Dean Starkman, journalists who no longer work for old-fashioned media cannot be called ‘journalists’ , while Salmon thinks quite the opposite, and here lies the second issue- between old-fashioned and contemporary media.

Both of them produce material worth reading. The difference between ‘now’ and ‘those halcyon days’ is that today we have got more high-grade journalism available to the public than ever before.

3. And last, but not least, it is not about the shortage of journalists, but that of critical readers, who absorb the information, without misinterpreting it.

What makes one person a good journalist is his ability to read between the lines, to engulf fully in a situation until all points of view are considered. Everyone can be a publisher on Twitter or Facebook, but not everyone can create a content worthy of notice.

Teaching Journalists to Read

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