By DANIELLE HESTER
The UNITY News

It has become sort of a buzz word in the journalism industry: Convergence.

It’s used loosely to describe the coming together of media, technology and journalism, and a contingent of students are experiencing what the buzz is all about.

For the first time, UNITY: Journalists of Color features a converged media-training project for college students. They will produce an interactive Web site, daily newscasts, webcasts, newspaper and daily radio broadcasts. They also will produce podcasts, slide shows, video commentaries and blogs.

More than 90 students from the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada, among other places, have been assigned to eight sections: television, print, Web, photography, copy editing, video, radio and design.

As a result of the project, UNITY convention attendees and journalists who are not in Chicago can receive news alerts, images and other information directly on their cell phones or handheld computer devices.

“I think the project is a good step. … They are uniting everything,” Jackson State University student Adrian Pittman said of the project, which got underway earlier this week. Pittman, 21, is part of the broadcast section.

The convergence effort is representative of the growing ties between news and technology. Those ties have become especially evident to journalists.

Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, now claiming millions of users globally, are changing the way journalists do their jobs, and how they reach readers and viewers online.

People are looking to the sites, used early on mostly for leisure, as another way to receive and provide information.

“[Social networking sites] were not meant to be used for news,” said Michelle Johnson, a professor at Emerson College in Boston, Mass. “[They] were for social networking, but news organizations have been taking these engines and using them to reach a broad number of people. … It’s like rapid firing publishing.”

Such sites have grown from year to year in an effort to satisfy the appetites of the technologically savvy, and those seeking information. Sites such as Twitter, Spock and Spokeo have created even more avenues for electronic communication.

Some media professionals say it allows them to connect quickly with reporters, organizations, readers, and sources. They also say it allows for fast research. Publications such as the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times require reporters to have Facebook profiles.

“For reporters, it compresses research time by 10,” said Dan Tynan, a freelancer in Wilmington, N.C., who says he spends a lot of his time on social-networking sites. He also said it allows him to develop and maintain close relationships with editors and reporters.

Tynan said the networking sites do raise some issues of privacy.

“Social networking opens you up to exposure, and you have to think twice about what you say. So privacy controls are very important. The rules are not defined. … this can be a disadvantage,” Tynan said.

Nevertheless, Johnson, who is working on the student project, said “the whole idea of convergence is that the way you cover news is changing; the concept is meant to be a quick way to communicate.”

topic: UNITY Convention
tags: convergence, new media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 12:58 am and is filed under Print, UNITY Convention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.