Hard(ly) News

A tour of my page flakes: Myself for sale. Or better yet, my words.

I updated my page flake. Get excited. It is more organized.

I established three columns, “Blogs”, “News”, and “Whatever”.

BLOGS
In the Blog section, I started with my own blog, because obviously I am writing for a reason. I am selling myself. It is important to get the word out there. Since I am writing and clearly, few people are reading, I might as well highlight and draw attention to me. I am writing my life away. READ ME. Next, I replaced the Writer Response Theory, blog, with a few blogs that pertain to my topic. “The Huffington Post” is one of the most reputable blogs out there. Arianna Huffington especially is interesting to read and insightful. She has new interpretations on political concepts and definitely worthy of reading. Next, is “The Thoughts of Nigel,” a blog written by a man who criticizes the media. This is one of the blogs my social bookmarking twin and I have in common. Next is “Write Something,” another communications blog we share. “Write Something” is about expressing yourself in whatever words you deem worthy. Finally, My last two RSS feeds in this column come from Diigo and Delicious, I included these two social bookmarking websites because of all the social bookmarking websites, I prefer these most. Almost unable to admit it, because I never thought that I would use either outside of class, these social bookmarking sites are becoming a regular part of my Internet process. I think it is important to keep them up here. They contribute more than you could understand.

NEWS
The news is extremely important to me, being that my name is Newsie and my topic is, um, well… the news! So I thought it was important to involve a variety of websites. First is MSNBC, one of my personal preferences. MSNBC sits front and center, at the top of the “news- worthy” column. MSNBC allows the user to search stories, subjects, fortresses, there is so much information on this site. Below them is CNN. Usually the two of them can have similar opinions. CNN and MSNBC are both grandly well rounded and their websites are designed very similarly. Next is the New York Times followed by the Wall Street Journal. Diversity is important, especially if you never really know if what your reading is true or not. It doesn’t hurt to have multiple publications and sources. Finally, as far as “real” news on my pageflake, there is Le Monde. Le Monde is a French journal. Le Monde directly translates as “the world.” I speak a little French (un peu), and I like French culture, so it’s fun to see what’s going on in their neck of the woods.

WHATEVER
The third and final column is more a random assortment of goodies. It is a bit smaller because most everything I use frequently has to pertain to blogs or news. Here, I have both “Universal News Search” and “Universal Blog Search” in references to the media and journalism. And at the bottom, I have cited four media-worthy sources. The two books listed are All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News, and Global Transformations, Politics, Economics, and Culture. The first discusses various aspects of the news and how it is presented to society, where as the second actually talks about international news and issues, specifically globalization. Also cited on here are two of my favorite news websites, the New York Times and MSNBC.

These pages are included because they are what is most important to me. I frequently use these sites, and if you are news savvy, you will find these to be helpful as well. There are also fun things on here like the blogs “the thoughts of Nigel” and “Write Something.” I am very interested in the media and news in terms of what’s going on in the world, but also in terms of how the media presents itself to the rest of the world. I think it is very interesting how it works. Hamilton, author of All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News, talks about the use of media and news on the Internet in his book. He says “Information wants to be free” and the only people who want news are the “me’s” and they only read the “daily me”- news that’s tailored to their personal interests. An interest in the world is important, but society keeps changing and the news that sells is constantly more and more entertainment based. The important hard-news issues are becoming less interesting because they are real, and people would rather read/see what’s “fun.”

This entry was posted on March 5, 2008 at 8:32 pm and is filed under News with tags news pageflakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.