Anderson Cooper - CNN's world-traveling...

Anderson Cooper - CNN's world-traveling investigative war-correspondent recently stepped in to Haiti and broached the #1 ethical debate by his heroic actions. Just a quick disclaimer - the video below verges on graphic content so if you are easily offended and don't like reality, then don't watch the below.Now, the reason that I am quite intrigued by this particular video is that Cooper has dived in and made a very very big statement; by assisting the boy Cooper changed the news. He stepped in and altered his position in the Haiti situation. He is no longer simply an objective journalist, he is no a participant in the news and the one who altered the course of events that he was reporting on.It's not very often that journalists themselves become the news by their own choices. For Cooper to have stepped in he must have felt that the boy was in dire straights and needed assistance that he wasn't receiving from anyone else at the scene.Personally I completely respect and admire him for stepping in. I made the decision a while back that I refuse to be an observer. I am a doer and people who want to do things have to get involved and not just report the news. I cannot do this. So it's very interesting to me that a journalist of Cooper's quality, experience and standing chose to step in, instead of waiting for the news headline to create itself.

I studied to be a journalist. I trained ...

I studied to be a journalist. I trained for difficult situations, for uncomfortable things to happen and for strange situations verging on impossible. I have wanted to be a war-correspondent since I was 10 years old. That will not happen.But on Sunday I was involved in a freak accident involving a plane, a bakkie and a few bloggers freebording. I ran towards the plane as did our whole group and not for one second did I think about stopping, taking photos or video and sending word to a media organisations. I could've, I am capable and I know how to, but I'd rather help. It's that simple and now I am certain of that.

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.

I've had it with Carte Blanche

I'm done with Derrick Watshisname and the Carte crew. I am honestly disappointed with the quality of their stories. More and more often I am seeing one sided, ill-researched pieces that lack any semblance of coherence. I'm also not sure what Tyler was on about in his post, lauding the piece as decent and fairly accurate. Think I might have caught a different show in a parallel universe on a different tangent to the one Tyler watched.Their piece on Web 2.0 was horrific. Congratulations to Rafiq and Dave for cracking the nod and showing some sense in a show filled with rambling and jumping from topic to topic.I followed Twitter throughout the show and there were some interesting responses to it throughout. Jason from Zoopy was insistent that we should take the story from where it comes, ie: old media. Boring argument that means nothing to me.I work for an "old media" company that is moving forward in leaps and bounds. M&G have been relentless in their new media endeavors and have definitely been heading the web 2. shove in SA.Carte Blanche, it appears, searched for "blogging" using this new toy they've found called "google" or something and came up with two names. Dave and Rafiq were both interviewed and made alot of sense. But what happened to getting more than one side of the story and more than one opinion in a piece? Dave and Rafiq work relatively closely with one another and are both based in CT. Now to the average viewer in SA it appears as if there is only web 2.0 development happening in CT. What about George, JHB, Durban and developers who roam the country? What about innovation on a national level?Why did they not take a look at the gurus of web 2.0 in SA who are pushing the envelope? Props to Rafiq for doing what he does and Dave for spreading the ideals and concepts to those who don't know, but I know for a fact that UKZN is also pushing new media as well as Rhodes University. Why not talk to those people too? Why only UCT as an institution.One twitterer commented: "@rafiq @daveduarte @zoopedup nice one guys...wife still doesn't get it though LOL ;P". That reflects bad journalism.John Webb has done some brilliant stuff with 702 Talk Radio and Carte Blance but this was dismal. The story jumped from web, to Mxit, to Facebook, flashing screenshots of TED conferences, YouTube videos and a host of other irrelevant pictures to look more web 2.0. None of these things were spoken of in the actual story.Another whopper of a quote from the story: "The pace of change has exceeded our ability to keep up." What exactly does that mean and who exactly are they referring to?In essence all that I am saying is that a show like this should never have been broadcast without an actual point. In fact, an explanation of something would've been great. There was no definition of what web 1.0 was, never mind what web 2.0 is and where it's headed.Pictured in a few of the scenes were Charl Norman and his site BlueWorld. Not a word spoken about the site, its competition with Facebook or a peep from Charl. I wonder if they knew Charl was behind BlueWorld when they filmed him with Rafiq, having coffee?I'm disappointed but not surprised with the level of their reporting and hope that they read this post (if they've learned anything from their own story) and realise that there is a lot more going on out there than two gurus in one city.Please don't mistake my post for ranting. I have no value to add to the show that was broadcast so this is not a jealousy thing. It's a responsible journalism thing.Again, congratulations to Dave and Rafiq who both deserved their exposure and it's great to see some exposure around the topic.See for yourself:

Conflicts of interest -What happened to ethics?

Any trained and qualified journalist knows that ethics are of great importance when writing an article. The topic, angle and genre of the article are irrelevant when it comes to ethics. They should always be present.I would like to take Charl Norman to task in this regard. I read this Muti'd article from his blog and have an issue with the entire concept.Firstly the list that Charl has compiled is obvious to an extent, no problem with that for the most part. However there are two inclusions that I think fall under conflict of interest. What is this list based upon? Opinion, choose, random selection?How could Charl have written an article wherein he names two of his own products as top web startups to watch? It's one thing to claim this on your personal blog as a blogger. But when the byline of the article states that the writer is a blogger, freelance journalist and web entrepreneur and then advertises his own blog I have a problem.That is some sort of paid advertising or an advertorial article. I immediately get the feeling while reading the article that the idea for the article stems from a want to promote Blueworld and to a lesser extent ZoopedUp.I am not saying this is the case, I am just saying that this is how I feel when I read the article.Intelligence should be weary of making this sort of thing a habit. The article is fine but would have been better served written by a journalist not involved in the content directly. In fact the best outcome would and should have been to look at Charl's blog post and ask an "objective" journalist to base a more extensive article on the blog post.All that Intelligence have done (in a not-so-intelligent manner) is helped to promote Charl's projects and along the way maybe include some other cool projects.I am all for promotion of web startups in SA and any promotion is great. But comes a point where the line must be drawn. The thing that really urks me is the fact that this article is branded as journalism. There is a fine line between bloggers and journalists. They are not one in the same thing at all and don't claim that they are. The article that appeared in the magazine was an expanded blog post for an author looking to self-advertise, on some level at least.Ethics are becoming scarce and I hope this isn't a trend that continues. New media is not a quick fix for larger magazines to fill pages with content. Let us not fall in to that trap.