Personalizing our news.

 “I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a newspaper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news.” This quote, that came straight out of the readings for the week from Chapter 2 of We the Media, when discussing the use of the web to help guide what was going on at the time of the 2000 presidential election.

This brought me back to a recent discussion in which myself and another person were discussing in what ways new medias these days can really make or break a person. In a class I took recently, I watched a clip of a politician on You Tube, which I might add was favored to win the election, was caught on a cell phone video camera using a racial slander which was later in the day posted on You Tube. Needless to say, he lost that election. When talking about using the web to “roll your own news” to get a more varied and complex story it’s really true that with our new medias we got the whole story and not just the fluff stuff that the topics of article pieces are discussing. There is no room for mistakes, no time gaps left open for misinterpretation, and one must always be at their best because you never know when a sneaky camera phone is going to be leering behind a corner.

So, with the new phenomenon of “pesonalizing” our news to exactly what we want to see beyond the headlines in papers and edited interviews on television, we must keep in mind there comes a point when we all will say something we didn’t mean, we just were lucky enough that no one cared enough to post us on You Tube!

• How will the major move to internet news lead to the demise of newspapers as we know them at both the local and the national levels?
• In what ways do/does You Tube have the potential to affect our world in world in a negative rather than positive way?