Parsing The Future

For this assignment, I read a blog post by Ryan Sholin about Links that Redefine News. This post was asking if anyone knew any innovative websites that were the future of journalism and mass communications. 

At first, I looked at the sites and thought that most of them weren't anything special. The  New York Times and such were all websites I regularly visited to get my fix of the news while procrastinating. However, I looked a little deeper and realized that some of these websites were a lot more creative than I thought. I pressed a couple links or buttons, got redirected, and found more fun things to do while reading articles. 

For the Las Vegas Sun, I used the flight tracker and ended up following some random airline and knowing when it was landing, if it was delayed and what airport it had departed. I was hooked at first, and I actually kept reading about which cities in the country had the most flight delays and such. Very crafty of them.

The City Block website was also very interesting. Although it is just getting on its feet and has not been fully developed, it has a very different perspective. The website tells you what is happening on your block, city and county. Yes, there are only a couple of cities that are on the website so far, but when it is fully completed and has much more included, I think that it will do well.

The website I enjoyed the most was Global Voices Online. This website was purely directed towards the audiences instead of other writers and journalists. This website has news from every country, and all the information is written by people in other countries. It gave me a sense of how everyone can now be connected to each other no matter what. It really made it seem like it is a small world after all. 

This assignment made me think about the new media world we experience everyday. We The Media by Dan Gillmor describes it perfectly. The world of mass media is now focused on consumers, and it more of a conversation than it is a lecture so to speak. People can voice their opinions and thoughts about each issue and article. Mostly, it shows how much the earth has evolved into such a technological world. It seems that every website now has ways for the reader to respond and have a community forum so that everyone is involved in every aspect of the news. Journalists are now in each and every one of us, some are just better than others :).