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Irrespective of the medium in which the story is being told the key is that the story needs to be good.

That is my basic premise and that is what I stand by.

In today’s market stories are able to be told in various mediums with various levels of interaction, lengths, research and dedication. This can be a wonderful movement in the right direction. However if merely taken at face value story telling can be lost and misused.

Good stories will prevail and let’s be honest if there is anything that we learned from the Carte Blanche story on Web 2.0 it’s that audiences are not stupid.

Basically what I am trying to get across is that primarily journalists are just that, journalists. This is their charge in life, their career, reputation and job. I live my career and am passionate about the maintenance of my industry, the ethics and self preservation (ofcourse).

The order of things is simple: The story, the building of the story, the medium used to promote the story and the audience the story reaches.

I think that in the media industry today the above order has been marginalised and isolated.

In other words, a journalist (whether multimedia, writer, photographer or whatever) works for a magazine for example, has an idea for a story and creates it. Then gives it to the magazine and they publish it.

The magazine’s target audience does not change week to week depending on the story so basically it’s up to us (media producers) to make that change, not so? No, not so apparently.

The other way of looking at this scenario is how the story is changed to fit the medium and target audience. In the process the story becomes twisted, warped and loses its thrust. Thus not portraying its initial and intended message effectively. Perfect example of this for me is the Carte Blanche story.

The situation there was simple and in my mind two things could have changed the outcome of the story.

Firstly: The medium for Carte Blanche is television. Therefore there isn’t much time to get in to the nitty gritty of a subject like web 2.0. Yet they still wanted to appear to be “cutting edge” so they stuck with it. Their deadlines were tight and had three days to compose a story. The justification for their failure to find more sources was that they were in Cape Town.

Considering the story is about technological developments and web 2.0 why didn’t Carte Blanche really cut some edges, get on to skype, twitter, Facebook and other mediums and do interviews in that way?

That’s what I call using the tools to make a story. The story idea was there, their market is solidified in many years of broadcasting so all that was left was to construct a story that they could put forward effectively. Using these mediums altogether would have expressed some sense of “web 2.0″ and communication developments.

Furthermore, why didn’t Carte Blanche push the story on to their website? Whatever could not have been done on TV could’ve been carried over to their website, more integration, more solutions, wider audience and effective use of the tools available to them.

Secondly: Change the name of the piece of you couldn’t get the right information to fill the story effectively. Simple.

Back to the point. The essence of what I am trying to say is that mentality needs to shift in media organisations. Most, if not all major media houses have established and consistent audiences who use various media resources to gather information. Take a story and mould it in to three of four different beasts and set it free. More exposure from a wider audience.

I have made a decision to slightly change the angle of my blog, as you can see, I am heavily embedded in the media sphere in South Africa (as many of you already know) and I believe that this is where my passion and my experience lie. So that is what I will be focusing on. The posts might be less frequent, but will hopefully be more in-depth regarding the media in SA.

Meet spongebobsqaureNic

I have started to do it recently as have many more bloggers in SA. I have seen people become bloggers and bloggers become products. The latest of which is Tyler. Tyler has apparently not only branded himself, but is currently RE-branding himself.

Now I have no real problem with this in essence from a person like Tyler because I understand what he is saying. People are brands, companies don’t buy in to a product any more, companies and clients all buy in to people. That means that you are up for sale, you are on the pricing boards every time you open your mouth. This is undeniably true.

My question is this: What have we become when we are selling ourselves openly, blatantly and shamelessly? People have always sold themselves as part of the package but had the tact to hide it. Now I openly say that I am worthy of x or y amount and my time is worth R350, R450 or more per hour. In days gone by you were the product up for sale but the client was not aware of this.

Blogs have, in recent times, played a great part in creating this forwardness if you will. People feel obligated to talk to their community and tell them what is going on, even if that is a trade secret (The secret being YOU). I personally like to keep my trade secrets to myself.

I am interested to see how the bloggers, new media evangelists and entrepreneurs feel about this topic.

Pulitzer now offers a prize for online journalism, or blogging, or whatever it is you want to call it.

To some it all up a quote from the Pulitzer Press Release dated 27th Nov 2006:

The Pulitzer Prize Board announced today that newspapers may now submit a full array of online material-such as databases, interactive graphics, and streaming video-in nearly all of its journalism categories.

Read the full release on the Pulitzer site now. Thanks to the Blog Herald for the story.

The Sunday Times newspaper has taken a step in to the bridge between the online world and the tangible newspaper world. In today’s publication the Sunday Times has elected to place their headlines and features from their website in a small feature on page two of the publication. Very interesting.

There is more however, at the end of two of the main stories on the front page there is a “tell us” option that provides a communication portal to the papers editors for the readers.

Obviously you cannot click this link and be forwarded to an email prompt. But this is the closest thing to a hyperlink that I’ve seen in a real newspaper. I think this is an interesting and bold step in to the future and I am glad to see that another organisation is challenging the Mail & Guardians movements in to the new media world. Integration is integral for big media to maintain a lead in the media market and it’s about time the Sunday Times has made that movement.