late post: Privacy vs Public Interest

I wrote this back in week 9 but forgot to post it, woops!

Today we had a seminar on the public’s right to know and the individual’s privacy, and if they are mutually exclusive.

There was discussion on where the line was drawn between the two, with a general conclusion that if it affects the public or the way in which the individual can do their job (like politicians), then the public should know.

This is still questionable with health issues, though, such as past presidents that had health issues that were kept quiet. Although it never affected their job, should the public still have been told?

One point Christina raised was that a journalist needs to be ready to bare everything in their own lives if they start exposing other people’s lives.

Should people that choose to be in the public eye still have the right to privacy?

One last interesting question was where we, as future journalists, draw the line on privacy and what we see as the future line between public interest and privacy.

Personally, I think the pressures of a journalism job would force many to reveal things they wouldn’t normally be inclined to do. Christina said that in her career she had moments where she drew the line and turned the camera off, and was lucky to keep her job through those moments.

I think on a personal level as journalists, we don’t have the final say on what will go to print and what doesn’t, but we can decide where our own individual line stands and how far we would go, and stand by those decisions, even in it means losing a job.

That’s the idealistic view, anyway.

Major Project: Local print or local online?

For my major project I wanted to focus on the topic of how the online world has changed the landscape of local and regional news, namely newspapers.  I’m yet to narrow my field to find a story, so more research is needed. I do know I want to aim it at the Walkley magazine, which has an audience of journalists.

One interesting article I found online suggests that as print is a ‘push’ medium, the role of print articles is to lure a reader to read something they may not be particularly interested in. This is different to the online world, which is considered a ‘pull’ medium: users seek out the information they want to read, therefore being a more ‘niche’ medium. Although this is the case, online also contributes to gathering an audience.

One idea is to focus on the coverage of events in print vs online, and what issues this may create or solve in the areas of bias, widening an audiences education on the topic and allowing the audiences viewpoint to change.

If there are differences in the above areas, what would be the impact of the slow decline of newspapers in the Western world? How would this change society and therefore the way that culture, economy and political agendas are changed?

In Universities, journalism students are taught technological ways of gathering and producing news as they’re at the forefront of this change. But should this be the focus, or should we be learning the impacts of how writing a story online is different to print?

Altogether, does the change in medium ultimately change the way a story is portrayed, or even the way a story is received??