Foote – Page 36 Assignment One

This assignment asks us how we would cover the news of an area senator’s presidential bid announcement. We have to cover the event in print, radio, television and online formats.

Print – Cover the announcement in excruciating detail.  Get a photo with the new candidate and his constituents for the dominant image of the first page. Show a infographic with all of his potential rivals, or maybe his current fundraising situation. Add a sidebar biographical piece, as well as a history of the political careers of his predecessors, perhaps.

Radio – Cover the announcement in more general terms. Use sound bites that are short and emotional. Record an interview with the candidate, and post the full version online. Get quotes from some of his more vocal supporters- or detractors. Refer listeners to print or online sources for more detail.

Television – Show the more animated parts of the announcement. Show the actual announcement and constituent reaction as the centerpiece of the story. Get face to face interviews with his supporters and campaign people.  Get interviews with political experts as well, talking about his chances at actually getting the spot.

Online – Bring all of the other stories together in one place. Have the print story laid out, with links in the text to pertinent internal and external Web sites. Have an embedded video of the TV story linked to on the page. Link to the candidate’s campaign website. Have the full audio interview posted, as well as interactive displays such as his “road to the white house,” or his personal history.

Parisot – Blog Assignment 1

So we watched this video in the last class, and I remember walking away at the end not feeling anything. Well, maybe I was thinking “Gee, that would be an awesome trailer for a movie.”

I don’t think this is so much a function of the video itself, as it is how desensitized I am to violence personally. The climax of the video, where the poor man gets his skull ventilated for him courtesy of some random terrorist, is no more gruesome than my last round of Gears of War, Bioshock, or my own current personal favorite, Cortex Command(go download it, now!)

As far as whether or not we should be showing this kind of thing on American television… yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This violence is partially a product of the chaos Western involvement has brought on these people.  This is the climate we’ve helped to create.  Regardless of your political leanings, you need to see this. If you’re against the war, you need to see it and then show as many people as you can. If you’re in support of the war… sit down, watch it, and ask yourself: is all of this worth it?

Mass Effect/Fox News controversy

I know this doesn’t exactly pertain to our class, but I felt like this needed to be shared.

Recently, a segment on Fox News aired “discussing” the Xbox 360 game Mass Effect. The point of the segment was their objection to what they called  “full digital nudity and sex.” In traditional Fox News fashion, however, this is untrue, and they wouldn’t let the only person on the show that had even played the game say that.

The video is below, and you can see for yourself: a bunch of uninformed old people talking about and passing judgement on things they simply don’t understand.

I don’t like having to take up internet arms to defend my chosen past time. But when I heard some talking head refer to a game with less sexual content than your average episode of The O.C. or Grey’s Anatomy as “Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas,”  I wept tears of blood and brain fluid in frustration.

However, just today, Kotaku (my gaming blog of choice) posted an open letter from Electronic Arts(the company that publishes Mass Effect) VP Jeff Brown, calling Fox News out on their gross inaccuracies, and asking them to set the record straight. The letter can be found here at Kotaku.

The most interesting thing about the letter was Brown saying that as interactive entertainment draws ever more people away from television, that he expects more stories and segments like this to come out decrying the evils of video games.

What do you all think?

Foote – News Website Assignment

I chose three different websites for my assignment, which all vary widely in their purpose, but still serve a journalistic purpose.

Website 1 – MSNBC.com

MSNBC.com is the online element of the MSNBC news network. It’s partially integrated with the MSN network from Microsoft. The site has several multimedia features, including videos and slideshows. The “Participate” feature involves polls, quizzes, surveys, and a feature called “First Person” where participants could upload their own photos and videos, analogous to CNN’s iReport.

Website 2 – Kotaku

Kotaku.com is a blog concerning video game and technology news, rumors, leaks and gossip. The interactive elements are fairly standard: photo slideshows, embedded videos from both Youtube and Gametrailers.com, and commentary areas for each entry.

Website 3 – FARK.com

Fark.com is a site built almost completely on user interactivity. The site is a news aggregator, which originally started as a place where users would submit off-beat, humorous news stories from around the web. It has since expanded to include sections for sports, business, technology, entertainment, and video stories. User interactivity, aside from the act of submitting stories to the site itself, is limited to the comment section included for every entry, which has enabled a rich community to form around the site.

Of the three websites I posted, the best one to use multimedia and user interactivity to the best journalistic potential was MSNBC, but the most interesting was FARK. MSNBC provided more multimedia content, in a slick format that was easy to access. FARK, however, was the most interesting because the content was gathered by the users themselves.

My first post

This is a test of the Emergency Weblog system. If this had been an actual post, actual content would have followed this message.