Press Corps - World Model United Nations

More documents

Recommendations

Info

surface articles that do not benefit it—consumers and experts alike have no solid reason to believe that. in fact, the truth is far more mundane. it has everything to do with the nuanced competition of Google’s economic desire to give us what we want, versus the public sphere’s mandate to give us what we need. To build a product that more closely aligns with users’ expectations, Google has spent years modifying Google may be the biggest public discourse gatekeeper in the history of communication. its algorithms to give more weight to results that meet certain qualifications within an individuals’ personal context, ranging from the obvious, like language and geographic region, to the esoteric, like browsing history and Internet service provider. Even when not logged into a Google account, the service still uses dozens of signals to determine the results it serves. This matters because personalization, by design, returns information specific to the individual looking for it. In other words, the more data a user deposits in Google’s vast repositories, the more likely Google is to offer results that align more closely to that user’s apparent mode of thinking. That pattern, critics fear, creates an echo chamber that blinds users to alternative perspectives and necessarily weakens their ability to participate in the public discourse. Habermas wrote that in the public sphere, in its ideal definition, “access is guaranteed” to all citizens. 11 Personalization threatens that egalitarian principle by creating spheres shared only by those of like minds, with the Google juggernaut mightily guarding the gate of each. this information is presented here with an eye toward both providing background about journalistic philosophy and fostering a session of critical thinking about the values each agency at WorldMUN should adopt. At the beginning of the conference, you will work with the other members of your agency to adopt a set of guiding values and group norms, which will serve the dual purpose of guiding your journalistic output as well as your team dynamic. Thinking about the importance of the history of news proves an irreplaceable component of actually producing it, for understanding where we are today provides guidance for where we’ll go tomorrow. The modern example of Google (or another ad-based search engine) as a gatekeeper is only an example of the larger historical trend: that large, powerful institutions, whether governments or private corporations, generally impose borders on the public discourse. As a journalist at WorldMuN, your duty is to open those confines and add new, under-explored angles to the discussion. indeed, 2013 presents more tools to do so than ever in human history. The Modern Evolution of Journalism Social Networks Democratize Journalism the emergent world of internet journalism has had the dual effect of illuminating new stars while blacking out many of the old ones. In broad strokes, print media has suffered greatly from the rise of free and online journalistic content. In large part, a lack of foresight doomed many of these old-world outlets: many papers in the united States alone failed in the final years of the last decade because they did not anticipate the precipitous declines in revenues that offering their content online for free would cause. On the one hand, print revenues had flowed plentifully until that point, and on the other, internet access had not proliferated extensively enough to yet give them pause. The survivors of that era, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—which announced in July 2012 that subscription revenues for the first time exceeded those from advertising—have emerged different institutions, ones that compete with upstarts with minimal start-up costs and whose business models were never predicated on the idea 10 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
of selling an expensive physical good. The Huffington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer play the same game, but by vastly different rules. 12 , 13 Still, though, the rules of print and the Web have much more in common with each other than they do with those of the public sphere’s twenty-first century darling, Twitter. twitter, one could argue, is the telegraph of today. used for transmission of short messages (though arbitrarily, rather than economically limited), the service offers its users (and onlookers) the opportunity to view in real time the updates other users provide—about anything. These range from the mundane to the truly groundbreaking. Its role as the social media tool of the Arab Spring helped reveal its international use. News frequently breaks on Twitter and then is further explicated on an agency’s own site. However, not only has the medium where news is broken changed—from print to television to the Web to Twitter—but so too have the people doing it. The Internet, and broadcast systems like Twitter especially, have birthed a new kind of reporter: the citizen-journalist. The nature of Twitter’s network as a one-tomany broadcast network, combined with its core gimmick, the 140-character limit, have propelled it to such a prominent place in today’s public sphere. While Twitter resembles most of history’s broadcast networks in that it allows one person to disseminate information to many without providing a clear interface for conversation, it differs from them in one essential way: like the Internet, Twitter invites anyone to participate. in two main ways, though, it is even better suited for the purpose of kindling the public discourse because: a) it represents a single destination where global trends are algorithmically tracked and b) it is even more accessible than the Web. Designed for a world before smartphones and utilized in the developing countries where those devices’ penetration remains minimal, that “core gimmick” had and still has a real purpose: enabling the global broadcast of messages small enough to fit in a single SMS. The prepaid phones of the Third World, where present, have allowed the rest of the planet to follow in real-time the political strife of, for instance, the Arab Spring. Twitter has proven the most prominent vehicle of the citizen-journalist’s rise, but others exist and continue to grow in importance. Among them, YouTube, and to a lesser extent, Facebook, rank high. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in July 2012 highlighted the ascendancy of YouTube on its journalistic merits. The rise of videocapable phones, coupled with YouTube’s massive Twitter has allowed outsiders to follow major world events in real time and was a popular tool used by protestors in the Arab Spring. network, has resulted in the deployment of citizenjournalist news teams across the earth. After the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, people viewed news coverage of the disaster on the video site almost 100 million times across the top 20 videos. In the Pew study, 39 percent of the top-viewed videos were “clearly identified as coming from citizens.” 14 those pieces vary in length, and at 2 minutes and 1 second, are on average (median) longer than local newscasts (41 seconds) and shorter than nationally-broadcast ones. Pew’s findings indicate that the YouTube citizenjournalist does not yet subscribe to a particular set of rules, whether in length of footage or specificity of content. Even US President Barack Obama, the figure most frequently mentioned in the videos studied in the Pew document, figured into only 4 percent of them. In other words, the most-viewed news videos on YouTube—of which almost two-fifths are the products of citizen-journalist—do not exhibit the kinds of overarching foci that traditional broadcast networks do. 11 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
Page 1 and 2: Press Corps World Model United Nati
Page 3 and 4: Letters Melbourne Host Directorate
Page 5 and 6: Letter from the Under-Secretary-Gen
Page 7 and 8: Introduction This year marks the fi
Page 9: weakened those networks’ hegemoni
Page 13 and 14: precisely that reason. Stewart’s
Page 15 and 16: on a per-issue basis—on chosen to
Page 17 and 18: The Australian Launched in 1964, Th
Page 19 and 20: a direct impact on your life. that
Page 21 and 22: Oct. 2012, . 33 “Mission and Valu
Page 23: Starr, Paul. The creation of the me

Press Corps - World Model United Nations

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?