I feel that the group work involved for project brief 4 with group members Jen and Trong, was effective and suited the brief very well. We were assigned the media idea of “texts. However, with such a broad area, it took us several weeks to find an idea that we felt suited the brief and that we would all enjoy doing. It did take some time, but with the help of weekly tutorials and constructive criticism in presenting our ideas to the class, we were able to think up of a more solid idea and concept for us to work on in group project. We decided to focus on the idea of the validity of media texts in the constantly changing world of journalism. There have been many cases of fabricated stories online that were quickly picked up by more traditional news institutions and portrayed as real. An example of such a case infamously happened a few years ago, where a false tweet had suggested that the President of the United States had been shot. This was picked up by news institutions, and led to massive consequences in the American economy, with financial stocks plummeting due to the false information. We as a group decided to focus on this in the context of a fake family and a daughter reported missing, based on a number of cases in the past few years. Another infamous case involved four sisters and their mother fighting an international custody battle for them to remain in Australia, whilst their Italian father fought for the girls to be in his care. The mother and grandmother of the girls approached the media, and provided unproven allegations that the Italian man was an abusive husband and father, something proven false some time after the media focus of the situation. These certain cases helped us establish an idea of how to approach project brief 4, which we feel was a suited idea. I feel that we have accomplished this project well.
My main task in the project in involved writing fake news stories (both traditional and online institutions) and assisting with the second day of filming. Due to external circumstances, I was unable to attend my group’s first day of filming. I made sure that my group was well-aware that I was having some trouble due to these circumstances, and also aimed to keep information open by being available to work on google drive on a day when I was ill. I was there on the second day of filming, and was glad to find it under control.
I think that the formatting of the blog was effective. The layout turned out very clean and user friendly, as the invented case is shown day by day. It explains the information well, offers a wide range of resources on the story, reflecting across all different types of media where individuals gain their information from. However, there were some troubles in the formatting of the blog, due to the amount of information that we had made in this invented case. Although we had sorted though it, it was some trouble at the time.
I found the annotated bibliographies to be the most challenging part of this assignment. This is because the idea of validity of text in media is quite a broad area, and many articles that I had gone through and looked at did not suit the task well enough. The information I did find, although useful, did have some strong limitations to the research sometimes. the writing of the news stories was also a problem at times, as I had to change much of the information to suit the information made by the rest of the group. It was also difficult at times to establish a more conservative tone in writing, while also differing a left wing article’s tone.
In this process, I believe that I have improved on how to communicate with group members and to work as a group, and I feel that this is our greatest success as a group. Because of our constant communication, we made sure to get the group’s approval across all aspects of the film, meaning that we are able to provide consistent information about the case, and made sure that all three of us were happy with the work and our own progress. I feel that this is an important asset to learn in terms of developing as a media practitioner. I also think that myself and all members of the group worked well in sorting out problems of the group, and did not experience any arguments or much difference of opinion in such a large project such as this. With the amount of content that we produced, we consistently remained organised and dedicated to the working of the project. We all negotiated when necessary, but there was rarely any problems in the group, due to the constant information that we provided each other about our work and our personal situations.