Independent Media & Jeff Cohen

This summer I had the opportunity to work for an independent media company in New York City, through the Park school, and Jeff Cohen was actually my intern adviser for the whole summer. He gave me a lot of good feedback throughout my time spent there and he had previously shared his past experience in corporate media with me. He covered a lot of the same information during his class visit. I also had interned with ABC news the previous summer and had gotten a taste of what it meant to work within the constraints of corporate media. I have come to learn the value of independent media through Jeff and through my internship experience. It is exciting how far independent media has come through better technology and the low cost of using multimedia through the internet. Independent has the chance to drive mainstream media in the right direction and as the become more and more popular, I think that mainstream media will either have to change dramatically or it will ultimately become obsolete. I believe that many of us Journalism majors will find us working in the multimedia/online field driven by independent forms of media, rather than corporate or the typical mainstream media. This seems to be a clear direction it is taking.

Re-thinking Objectivity

A part of the problem with the news media today is it merely spits back the rhetoric politicians throw around, rather than effectively analyzing or questioning it. The article "Re-thinking objectivity," talked about the pillars of journalism being objectivity, fairness, and balance. The problem being when striving for these values, many journalists lose the value of truth in reporting, which is most valuable to a news consumer. Instead of objectivity, I think that the news media is moving toward being more transparent, which is more valuable and usefull in dissecting and understanding the news and the reality it is portraying.

The Agenda Setting Media

"Newspapers and television news, even the tightly edited pages of a tabloid newspaper or internet web site, do considerably more than signal the existence of major events and issues."

By definition the media inherently has the responsibility of agenda setting for the entire country. If the media had not harped on the issue of illegal immigration and the protests that occured, would Congress have been forced to addressed the issue through legislation? Agenda setting seems to have malicious conotations attached to it, but in reality it is really just a form of priority setting. The problem with this is that although the media is supposed to hold the public's interest as the most important thing when considering stories, it has conflicting interests with what will receive the highest ratings and what stories the advertisers are going to be the most happy with. Not to mention with the failing resources, media has to consider what stories are the most economically smart to cover. It means that the media might skip over important issues since they are not the most exciting or downplay the importance of another issue because of conflicting interests. Hopefully with the growing number of news sources, people will become more media literate and begin to seek out stories of importance on their own. With a growing number of news sources also comes a media watchdog aspect between all of them, if something becomes important on the web or from a smaller source then the bigger news media companies will be forced to pick up the story. Although agenda setting is not inherently bad, the conflicting interests of mainstream media can make it a negative thing for the public.

"A year in the news" by The Project for Excellence in Journalism

The report's main idea seems stems from narrowness of the news in 2007, where the media only covered two or three big stories throughout the year. The media fell short of being able to responsibly cover what was going on due to lack of resources, especially in relation to the U.S. interests abroad. The U.S. is known for not covering international stories like other countries do and the report showed that the media missed out on stories that were of direct U.S. interest. The biggest is example of this occuring is with Afghanistan, which received 1% of the coverage, despite the fact there are still U.S. troops there. If the media chooses to only pay attention to stories of U.S. interest abroad then they have to make sure to actually cover them as opposed to using all of their resources on just the Iraq war. Even though the U.S. is at war in Iraq, they also still had troops in Afghanistan, and tensions were mounting all around the middle east and in other areas of the world that directly affected the U.S.
Since there was a great increase in the lack of resources for media, many of the stories were hit and run stories that were great for the moment, but lacked anything of substance. Journalists and media could have given these stories value, but instead only covered them as events rather than continuing to develop and analyze them as weeks went on. These included stories like the shooting at Virginia tech and the Minneapolis bridge collapsing, which both could have been developed into stories involving deeper issues within the U.S. Since these hit and run stories were being harped on, long term issues like economics, health care, and business were mostly ignored since the resources went elsewhere. Even though the actual rat race of the election was highly covered, some of the most important issues were not covered and not analyzed by the media.
As resources grow in online and independent media, the hope is that issues can be covered more fully and developed thoroughly for less money than it would have cost for older sources of media. Since the media seems to be missing the big picture most of the time, which the report pointed out using graphs and statistics, it is in need of being steered in a new direction.