EME6414 Journal

My office hosted an orientation last week for about 100 students who are going abroad in the fall. It was an event run by my office and mirrored the typical orientation that students go through, with informational sessions throughout the day followed by evening teambuilding activities and a night in one of the campus residence halls. I worked closely with the group of students who will be studying in London. I led several sessions regarding their future academics, living, and cultural activities. Most of these sessions also included their parents. After spending two full days interacting with these students and parents, many of them sent me friend requests on Facebook. I'm not entirely sure how they found me on there, as I use my first and middle name on my personal profile in order to avoid such happenings. Regardless, I try to keep my work and personal lives separate to an extent on social media. I'm friends with my colleagues on my personal page, as I'm also friends ...

Let me preface this by saying that I love social journalism. I think it's an incredible way for those who are passionate about writing or about a specific topic to get their voice out there and for those who hope to become traditional journalists to hone their skills. Many of my fellow journalism interns got their start on social journalism platforms and many more will spend free time 'freelancing' on social journalism platforms as they try to make the pursuit into a career. I've seen and heard discussion praising social journalism for many of the reasons I listed above. I agree with the praise - it's a great platform for getting one's voice heard, especially on positions/topics that are often marginalized. But I read quite a bit of social journalism and have spent a bit of time perusing Medium, which can offer great content and incredible writing. But it's a wide spectrum and I'd argue that much of it should not be considered journalism. (I think ther...

Just like diamonds... the internet is forever. Ed Sheeran certainly found that out this week when his tweets from 5-6 years ago expressing opinions some would consider problematic came to light in a Buzzfeed article  after he deleted his Twitter account and then re-instated it minus these tweets. (There's a swear word or two in there, fair warning.) It's becoming more and more common while scrolling Twitter or Facebook to see links to Buzzfeed or HuffPo posts calling out celebrities or politicians for misguided/cringeworthy tweets. I've seen a barrage of them in the last six months. I think there are pros and cons to that sort of article. Accountability can be a great way to keep people in line and I do think it's important to foster discussions about political correctness, mutual respect, and general human kindness and empathy, but I'm not sure that the point of a call-out article is to serve as anything more than clickbait in the way that some radio hosts are ...

One of my favorite websites is Longform.org , a curation site for longform journalism. I love reading narrative non-fiction and Longform is a great resource for finding curated pieces that are judged to be the cream of the crop. I've become even more appreciative of websites/apps integrating other Web 2.0 tools into their product and I was excited to see that not only can I easily add Longform articles into my Pocket app, but the Longform website has its own built-in option from which you can click a Read Later button and articles will save into your Pocket account. Generally when surfing Longform, you click a headline of an article, which is linked to the source of where the article is housed. From there, I could easily add the article into my Pocket with the web extension, but it saves me a step to simply click the Pocket button on Longform's site. I think it's incredibly smart for websites to integrate tools like this into their sites, as it helps make web surfing ...

I'm officially a Pocket convert! Convert is probably not the correct word, as I didn't have a good bookmarking method before, but I am newly obsessed with Pocket. I wasn't sure it was something I would actually use/find useful at first, but I'm happy to report that I was wrong wrong wrong. I played around with it a little last week, but I managed to catch some kind of bug over the weekend that put me out of commission, so I got a chance to poke around the web more than usual, which allowed me to utilize Pocket more. I'm a huge fan of narrative non-fiction and longform journalism and Pocket has saved me from myself - I no longer need to have 40+ tabs open on Safari on my iPhone. But I also don't worry about losing articles I find on Twitter but want to save for later in order to keep scrolling through my feed. (I'm so stoked not to have to shuffle through 30 tabs of Safari articles to find a particular piece I want to read!) I especially like that all o...

After reading the Mason & Suri piece and commenting on this week's discussion board thread about crowdsourcing, I got to thinking/doing some research about it from a more in-depth journalism perspective and how it can be used in the field.  One of the most interesting ways I found was that of the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment in 2009. The Guardian is one the United Kingdom's most respected and well-read national newspapers. It prints daily and has a website similar in scale to that of the New York Times. In 2009, the Guardian digitally published 700,00 receipts from Members of Parliament, many of which were evidence of wide-scale political corruption and expense fraud.  In an attempt to quickly gather information and to determine which receipts/which expenses held promise of scandal, the Guardian asked its readers to digitally comb through the 700,000 documents. They asked users to comment, highlight, provide notes, and analyze any expenses of interest and...

This isn't strictly Web 2.0/social media related, but this article features a fascinating merge between art and technology in a really incredible way and is too cool not to share. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has more than 34,000 works in its collection, of which it can only display 5% of at any given time. (Viewing the entire collection would involve walking 121 miles.) In order to reach as many people as possible with its collection, the museum has set up an on-demand art gallery via text message. To receive a piece of art via text, send a message reading "send me" followed by a word, a color, or an emoji to 57251. All works of the collection have been archived digitally with keywords/colors and the text with your unique keyword will trigger a piece of art be sent to you matching your keyword. I tried it with the word "potatoes" (I was eating a potato at the time) and within 20 seconds received a portrait of potatoes and a piece of bacon done ...