Find a story, construct it and set it free...everywhere

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.