Over the past 20 minutes, I have written and deleted what would have been countless introductory posts to this blog. Certainly the hardest part of any new endeavor, I have found, is actually getting your brain in gear and beginning, especially if the initial topic or focus is still unclear, as it is to me.
Since I am still not sure what precisely this blog will be about, I suppose the best place to start would be to introduce myself. My name is Colleen Ferguson, and I am an undergraduate senior print journalism and multimedia double major at Point Park University. Over the past three years, I have watched the School of Communication within the University develop and grow to accommodate and better prepare students to enter the changing field of the media. As newspapers all over the country continue to die out, online publications are booming and overtaking even the tried and true news sources.
Ever since I was young, a naive pre-teen stupidly (and probably dangerously) “hanging out” on these new things called message boards, I found the Internet to be a fascinating place. As I grew older, I began to understand its potential as a news source and fully appreciate the new perspectives to be found around the world wide web. Not only are national and international news literally at your fingertips, but that news can be presented through any desirable medium – text, video, audio, graphics and interactive elements.
It’s the interactivity that most fascinates me. The new hot topic word of the industry is “multimedia,” and the concept of presenting the news through a combination of media is appealing and exciting to the dying print publication industry. But multimedia, I think, should be more than just presenting the facts in several different manners. Yes, a great graphical element to support a statistic in a textual news story makes the information more accessible to readers. Yes, the Internet has the capability to support any representation of information we can imagine, and even some that haven’t been imagined yet. But the key to making multimedia elements of a news story successful is how the information engages the reader.
With the Internet at the level it is now, with access to information half way across the world accessible in just a few clicks of a mouse, information is not scarce. New perspectives on that information is, however. This long-winded post, in essence, is meant to say that interactivity is the key. Readers, myself included, are looking for a conversation about the news and facts, to be presented the information and have the opportunity to peruse it at will and draw our own conclusions, while it also looks pretty and it technologically dazzling.
This is what I hope to learn in my last year at school, and this is what I hope to bring to the world when I get the opportunity.
cnfergu 