Web media: not what you'd expect..

Blogging. Thats where it's at nowadays. I'm ecstatic.

When I chose to take Web Media, I knew it would test my computing knowledge, but I did not realise it would be intelletual as well. I guess it all depends on what you write about though, because some people don't write blogs worth reading. Some people don't write to have their work read. As a budding journalist, out of habit I always write for an audience.

I have mixed feelings about blogging, something I openly expressed in class when we wrote a blog on a piece of paper and people came around commenting on them. I said it's something of a modernised diary, only it's public. Diarys are meant to be secret but blogs are open to scrutiny by bloggers around the world. While criticism is healthy for any writer, it can't be controlled online and it can potentially destroy a writers confidence. I'm always afraid someone's going to slam my blog when all I'm doing is putting my opinion out there. Like crows flocking around a dying animal.

In our first Web Media class we looked at coComment and del.icio.us. coComment allows us to tag our blogs so other class members can see them and del.icio.us allows us to tag websites we've found that could be useful.

I found an interesting blog which raised some interesting issues for journalists. It talks about the lack of jobs in the journalism industry. We are being trained for an industry that doesn't need us apparently.

However, in a reading on moodle, it says that there's never been a better time to be a journalist. Mark Briggs said ''there has never been a time that offered so many powerful ways to tell stories and serve readers with information.'' This is true being that we live in the technological age. Imagine how much harder it would have been to be a journalist 20 years back.

Journalism is about the internet as much as it is about newspapers. So it makes sense that we should be learning this stuff. Mark Briggs also said that blogs are useful for journalists because
"it’s a notebook kept in the public sphere so reporters know which topics have “juice,” helping them prioritize the stories they should work on."

I just hope that the current drought for journalism jobs doesn't prove to be too much of a hurdle once I'm out in the workforce. I see my friends getting all these internships so surely that says something? The media has become much more web-based and we thought arming ourselves with internet knowledge would make us irresistable to potential employers... but now I'm not so sure.

Scary, isn't it?