Topic 1 Week 5 - Meikle

What do you think constitutes ‘news’ on the Web?

The news has completely reinvented itself from where one of the major ways of communicating events across the globe, was through the use of a the telegraph. Now there's numerous outlets, whereby news can be consumed. Radio, newspapers, the internet, tv, mobile phones etc are the main mediums whereby people can access the news. This would lead onto Burnett and Marshall's concept of 'informational news', whereby people are now faced with an array of news sources, that they can now choose the 'hierachy' of which these different sources lie. This in turn would cause a problem because you would need to ask well 'what constitutes news?'. I suppose it lies within a persons perceptions of what they think good news is and i'm not saying that in the sense of whether the topic is pessimistic or optimistic but whether the source is reliable, where did they get their sources from? is the news of interest to you, is it left wing or right wing? does it draw you in? who's delivering the news? is it someone with a camcorder in their bedroom because then would that be a blog rather than real news? There's all these question which someone would need to answer to know whether the news their viewing is worthy of being called news.

Going back to the idea of someone filming in a bedroom and posting on the web, which is apparent on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcOe2JF4EXI&feature=related. im aware that this guy is annoying) Would this mean that this made someone a journalist? or would it be like what Burnett Marshall said about how people are merely 'retrieving' the information from other news outlets and therefore not 'new avenues for new kinds of journalists to develop and publish new kinds of news'. I can understand their point because they could get there news source from anywhere and most of the time these people are criticising whats been said, and not coming up with anything new. On the otherhand some news organisations may do the same, but because they have the better production and the space to publish this news professionally, it doesn't look as bad. It all comes down to those previous questions; is it reliable? who's talking? etc.

Also if we then look at http://www.indymedia.org.uk/ who's described themselves as a website that a network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues. Which means that they break away from the news you might see at 10pm on BBC1. It's also obvious that this type of news is popular as its now in its third year or production, so i suppose i again depends on the person and what they think news is and whether they want to follow it.