Group project class feedback: processing of ideas. Week 9 workshop

With such a broad area of ’text’ it was a struggle for our group to come up with a solid idea for a text. Originally, we had the idea to create a blog relating to different media texts and the special relationship that individuals can have with them. For example, someone’s favourite television show, movie or book can create something special in an individuals life. But, upon group discussion, we realised that it would be a complex idea for our group, leading us to decide against this idea. Upon class feedback, we then decided to focus on how individuals gain access to the news. This would of been similar to our original idea, as we would have interviewed individuals who access the news differently. For example, someone who prefers television and someone who only access news and current events via their twitter/social media accounts. This idea, however, was also seen to broad during class discussion, which led us to the idea of the project. Inspired by the changing world of journalism, we decided to focus on the recent increase of twitter being used as sources by mainstream media. Today, tweets are being used as primary sources in news coverage, with screen shots being used in online and television reports. It is also used as eye-witness accounts, and has proven to be a very useful source for journalism. However, there has been countless examples where mainstream media has used social media to report incorrect news stories, due to an individual lying on social media. Sometimes, this has lead to major events. For example, television and internet media reacted swiftly when a fake tweet claimed that the President of the United States had been shot, leading to mass economic losses, due to the Dow Jones plummeting. However, the White House press secretary released a statement, stating that these claims made on social media were false. We based our made up news story on this. We decided to use a family dispute as the focus, based on an international custody dispute between an Australian mother and an Italian father over their four daughters. This led to a highly publicised case, in which the media was criticised for being too involved in such a private matter, such as displaying footage of the girls distressed as they were being physically taken away from their mother. We decided to choose a fake kidnapping case, in which the mother exploits the media to give her more of a case in gaining full custody of her daughter. We chose to record the story in a number of different media formats, such as twitters, internet news sites, current affair reports and traditional newspaper stories. We hope to reflect how the media uses the format of news, as well as the public reaction from such story. In this, our aim was to highlight how social media as a news source should be used with caution, and more research should be done by journalists before printing a story. Another example of this happening involved controversial blogger, Belle Gibson. Her claims that whole-foods and natural diet cured her of cancer was found to be untrue, only after she gained media attention and social media awards for her story. She admitted that it was untrue, and publications admitted that they should have done more research in to her claims, instead of only using her story as a source.  Overall, I feel that my group has worked well with the constructive criticisms made during the tutorials.