So the end has come to my blogging for the semester. It has been quite the experience (I’m no technological wiz) and now it seems my blog is MIA. However, it has been incredibly interesting to see the way the media works in an online environment and learn to utilise it as a medium. It has been interesting to see the ways others have approached the same task to such different ends.

I don’t think this will be my last blog, being the new face of journalism and all, blogging seems to be a skill to hone and develop. Maybe once I work out how to use the internet things will be a lot easier.

This week I have realised political correctness brings to the verge of stroke sometimes. The British government has said television shows which are ”unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory” have to go. Good grief. This means truly funny shows like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder wouldn’t make it on air these days.   

 The famous Fawlty Towers episode where Basil insults the Germans thwarts every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. However, as Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer said “it is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over 30 years.”

But it looks like there won’t be any more reruns to look forward to if these laws go through. Even satirical and truly ironic humour will be banned. Do they not see what most people do and that these jokes are funny because they reflect societal injustices in a comedic form? They are funny because they are true. Laughing at faults in society is one of the best ways to raise them. Faulty towers mocks racism and social injustice, it doesn’t endorse it. As Heffer said, “such creations remind us that the only way, sometimes, to cope with aspects of life that are irritating, depressing or infuriating is to magnify their absurdity by means that will sometimes verge upon the cruel, and then laugh at them”. If there are people out there who cannot work that out, we have bigger problems than political correctness. Bigger than television censorship can fix. I know obvious American humour struggles with the black, dry humour of the British – ie. the need to create an American and far less funny version of the British hit TV show The Office. Geez that’s embarrassing.

Has the media gone crazy with political correctness?

The new guidelines were devised after BBC broadcasters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up the now elderly actor who played the intimidated Spaniard from Fawlty Towers. The comedians mocked him over the carnal behaviour of his granddaughter which caused outrage in listeners. Outraged or not, surely this kind of response wasn’t necessary! A slap on the wrist and a suggestion to be a bit more tasteful in the future would have done the trick. The television and broadcasting board didn’t need to come up with a grand list of things to ban from comedy across the country.  

What is there left to laugh at?

Heffer makes the point that there is nothing on the BBC anymore for anyone past the age of 40, except for maybe Gardener’s World. However, that will only last until someone realises how much it “discriminates against those who don’t have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one”.

Sometimes the media takes itself a bit seriously. It harks back to the censorship imposed on shows like South Park. It made fun of absolutely every group known to man kind, not just minority groups. It offended every religion, atheism, every race and every social group. No one was left out of their comedy yet people still saw the need to complain. The problem is we can make fun of everyone else but ourselves. However, now we seem to want to fight other people’s battles. If we become so precious we can’t laugh at ourselves the PC problem will get out of hand. If you can’t hack a joke, you’re not going to be able to hack a lot of things in life. Is the media creating generations of simpering, whining, PC yuppies?

As would be expected, visits to the City Journal Online increases around the time students have to hand in assignments for the site, i.e. August, September, October. There were 527 hits in October 2008 and 494 September 2009, and already 106 hits in the first few days of October this year. The total unique users, 3,472, is good for such a small online site. There were also 24, 411 page views. According to predictions based on the last month’s stats, there should be 543 new hits in the next month and 3,800 page views.

People were spending about seven minutes on the page throughout September and October. They city journal needs to employ technique’s to make the reader stay on the page. Extra links and extra information on stories would give the reader more reason to stay and answer any questions about stories they may go elsewhere to find the answers to. The layout is fairly easy to navigate around but there is not enough content to pad out the site and make it a full and complete source.

It would be great to imagine the City Journal has a lot of hits from CBD readers, but it doesn’t seem all that likely. Most hits are from the staff and students compiling it … and the students mum’s. The vast majority of prolonged visits were from RMIT addresses.

Despite this the site is reaching its target audience, with most visitors from Melbourne. Sydney gets a little bit of a look in too. There is the occasional international hit which could be from other universities looking at different student news sources. This is a good sign that the City Journal is appealing to locals but indicates they could gain greater readership different areas.

Most people accessed the city journal from the homepage, meaning they had it set as their homepage (in which case they only stayed for about 10 seconds) or went there specifically. Perhaps the city journal needs to make sure they use better links and better key words to that their stories pop up on Google searches more readily. This may draw a greater crowd and lead to an uptake of returning viewers.

There was a random spike in visit duration on September 11. Maybe people are just extra news conscious and paranoid on that day? But then the readers don’t come from small towns that breed hick paranoia. The kind of people who believe their one or even half-horse town is the next to be hit by terrorism. The kind of people who duck when planes fly overhead, even though they live in a non-important, non-threatening, self important little town: population 2000 twats. Or perhaps not… Probably not, given there was an even larger spike on the 8^th.

The Herald Sun website is a colourful array of tightly packed stories and flashing advertisements. It is very busy, very flashy (literally) and packed together so tightly it’s almost too much to take in. The flashing advertisements and videos are distracting, and things change so quickly it’s hard to keep up. The fact that it is ever changing in some ways keeps your attention and makes you stay on the page but sometimes it is all too much and makes you desperately search for an escape, just so the flashing stops. The black writing on the white background is the only thing that makes the text stand out against all the other bells and whistles. Similarly the simple colour palate – red, blue and black – and the block-left alignment make it easier to read the chunks of text.

There is very little consistency between the pages. There are even differences between two business pages or two sports pages. The fonts, layouts and colours are often different throughout the website and every chunk seems to be different. This lack of consistency makes it hard to make your way around the site and hard to find your way back.

The grid is quite different to the layout of the Herald Sun newspaper, although it still has the same ridiculously large photo of the day as the main focus. The things takes up about two-thirds of the page! Nearly every story, no matter how small, has a photograph to accompany it. Heaven forbid it should sit there all lonely on the page without a visual aid to make it worth while. It is as if the headlines can’t stand for themselves. But unfortunately this is often the case. The headlines for the online version of the Herald Pun are even punnier than the print version. How is it even possible? Do they hire greeting card writers to churn out those corkers?

There are tonnes of links which make the homepage interesting but also mean it is very easy to get distracted from the news and start reading celebrity gossip or fat blasting secrets. ‘Jenny lost 12 kilos off her gut in three weeks! You can do it too!’ It even ranks the top five most popular ever stories of the day, totally. It is as though it’s all about ratings and not the fact that hundreds died in a tsunami this morning.

MOST POPULAR TODAY

mmm. also my favourite news

Different elements on the page, other than ‘Confidential’ and ‘Superfooty’ – important though they are – aren’t easily distinguishable from one another. The page is too crowded and doesn’t make for easy navigation. The navigation bar at the top of the page is the only thing that helps the reader navigate around. The homepage especially is impossible to get around. You often end up on links that lead you away from the news and towards things like celebrity baby pictures and tips for how to use avocado effectively. The text varies quite a lot in size, font and colour. Some even flash pretty colours.

The flashing advertisements and videos on the side, or even in the centre of the page, are quite distracting at times and make it hard to concentrate on the text. But I guess they have to make a living. Despite this, connectivity on the Herald Sun website is very good, the links often expand well on the topic and provide in-depth information and additional background if you want to know even more about a story. However, this is tainted by the somewhat warped hierarchy at the Herald Sun … unless you also consider sport and celebrity gossip to be the most important things in news.

eg. top news, second ranking story of the day

A few good clothes for Suri

TOM Cruise and Katie Holmes are so keen that their daughter Suri looks her best, the Hollywood pair have spent a reported $4million on her clothes

Wow. I could not get enough of the freak weather we had on Wednesday… and I know I’m not the only one. I know extreme weather can be potentially fatal but I have always loved it since I was a kid. I used to get really excited when we’d have blackouts because it would mean we’d get to use candles and I could feel my bed swaying with the force of the wind at night. If there were trees down on the way to school the next day it was even better. A nice slow detour to school and the thrill of seeing the storm aftermath. Creepy as it was, I knew I wasn’t alone with this passion for storms. Most of my friends admitted to being just as excited.

This passion I have occasionally extends into a morbid curiosity with natural disasters. Whilst the death tolls are tragic I become addicted to the news and can’t seem to get enough of it. On Wednesday we had a small tornado, small earthquakes, giant hail stones, freak blood-red dust storms and floods. Mother Nature pulled out her mixed bag and emptied its contents onto the south eastern sea board of Australia with an almighty force. I got up early to absorb news for another subject and I am so glad that I did, I couldn’t stop watching and could barely pry myself away from the television to go to uni and kept up to date on the internet all day. The coverage from all online newspapers was constant and detailed and the morning television news didn’t cover anything else.

Just like when I was a kid, I found that I was not the only one hanging out for details on these weather anomalies. Everyone loves a good storm, unless of course they are in it. If you ask the lay, non-journalistic person, I guarantee most will say they love the weather man/woman and think they would be good at the job themselves. This innate human reaction to the weather and its occasional extremes has been the driving force for many a good news day over the years. Its one of those things people can’t help but follow. People just genuinely love the weather. Perhaps I should be a weather girl, because like many people I am genuinely tickled pink to read about the weather and what it’s up to.

I always feel that in crime cases it’s a very delicate balance between the public right to know and allowing enough room for retribution. If someone is hounded endlessly by the media then there is little likelihood of anyone forgetting who they are, what they did and, sometimes most importantly, where they live.

This is definitely the case with convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson.

This made me think back to when I was in year 10 and doing work experience in the Ballarat courts. I had access to the criminal databases and sat in on a week’s worth of cases, many of which were related to paedophilia. I quickly learned that my one horse town of Buninyong, twenty minutes out of Ballarat, had become a haven for convicted rapists and paedophiles, not to mention a host of wife beaters. The magistrate told me that living out of town allowed them the privacy to live normal lives after prison. I worked out that three of my close neighbours were either rapists or paedophiles and this applied to about 30 per cent of neighbourhood. Before I knew this I was contented to walk around at any time of the day or night by myself and was also partial to making trips to the washing line with nary a item of clothing. When I found out I was initially shocked, and then thought to myself that if I had carried on without a care previously, why should I change my routine now? In reality, these were rehabilitated and closely monitored individuals and it seemed unfair not to allow them the ability to redeem themselves and integrate back into society. They had paid for their crimes so I figured there was no point persecuting someone even further by avoiding walking by their house.

In the case of Dennis Ferguson, the Herald Sun has been uncharacteristically reserved and treated him pretty fairly, but the catch 22 is that any reporting will inflate his criminal profile even more. This will only worsen the situation, with people who didn’t know about his crimes adding to the complaints and attitude that may drive him out of his home, when legally he has every right to be there. The hype has lead Kevin Rudd to urge neighbours not to take the law into their own hands, which is what often happens when the whereabouts of paedophiles is determined by the media. It is quite a dangerous balance between informing the public and doing damage to that community.

As journalists, whether unintentionally or not, we pick and chose from current events which ones we will bring to the fore and which ones aren’t interesting or relevant for our audience. Whether this is because we want to sell newspapers or get hits on our blogs, or because we genuinely believe they are the most newsworthy items of the day, we have a huge influence on what many people consider to be the pressing news on the world around them.

Last Tuesday the leading story on Seven, Nine and Ten was the shock horror revelation that ham and other processed meats were bad for you. You’re kidding! Who would have expected blended, artificially flavoured and coloured slices of cold sandwich filler was bad for you? The animals minerals and vegetables the stras came from wouldn’t even recognise themselves in that form. I cannot believe this medical epiphany was the lead story of nearly every news station! Mothers and lunch ladies around Australia surely needed to sit down when they heard the breaking news. I went to work and it was the topic of conversation. Everyone thought the revelation that ham was bad for you was the most important thing that happened in Australia that day. When I got home it was the topic of conversation and when I went to the gym there were three TV channels repeating the story over and over. September 11 eat your heart out.

In other mind-blowing, world-blowing news, US rapper Ja Rule flew into Sydney and immediately proceeded to drive his stupid rapper arse down the wrong side of the Pymont highway. He did this just after flying into the country when he had waited months for permission to enter Australia because of criminal charges he holds in the US. Well, hells bells. I can’t say a story based solely on someone else’s stupidity interested me that much and I’m sure there were more important things happening in the world at that time. Even the ham story trumps this. At least the ham story affects people’s lives.

Thinking back a few years to when I was in year 12, I still can’t believe the fuss over the Schapelle Corby verdict. The amount of people who had ordered the verdict on her sentence to be sent to their mobile so they knew straight away was amazing. Not to downplay the situation, because many a scandal addict was infatuated with the story and it affected Australia and issues regarding international prosecution of drug smugglers. However, I just couldn’t believe the way people subscribed to the story with that level of commitment. People discussed every aspect of the story at lunchtime and tried to work out for themselves if she was guilty or innocent. The media had just whipped everyone up into a frenzy over the fate of some poor girl, who whether guilty or innocent, should not have gone to jail for more than two years for the offense. They turned a simple news story into the ‘human interest’ story of the year. 

Tonight as I trawled through news trying to get inspiration for this blog I was constantly distracted by all the other features that you’re provided with online. I was looking at the headlines for the day and I got lost on a tangent when a flashing advertisement with an enticing ‘click here’ button got the better of me. It sat at the top of The Age article screaming ‘tell the government you support gay marriage’ and ‘love doesn’t discriminate and neither should Kevin’ and had a hilarious image of Kevin Rudd with hearts around him. I thought wow, I support gay marriage, the imagery has got me reeled in and I should totally vote.

Ten minutes later I’m back to the news. This time I’m distracted by a BMI calculator on the Herald Sun website. Again, I can’t help it. All of a sudden I want to calculate my BMI. I’m not interested in the diet they’re selling with the BMI calculator, and even though I know my BMI and couldn’t care less about it, for some reason I just really want to use that calculator. It’s an unkown force of modern life that seems to drive us towards these such applications. 

These news sites have me hooked, but is it because of the news? If I read the newspaper in the morning there is nothing other than my breakfast to distract me, but I can’t seem to make it through an article when I read online. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just a completely different experience to newspapers or even television journalism for that matter. It’s definitely focused on and effective at keeping people on their site, but it’s also very entertainment focused. How am I supposed to work out what’s happening in the world when I can calculate how to ‘lift my lifestyle with a better job?’ It’s not their fault that the generations have shorter and shorter attention spans, and I know mine is one of the shortest, but is this what we come to the newspaper home pages for?

The Herald Sun did not fail to disappoint again this week. Monday’s page seven housed a story about a dog that is set to play the main role in upcoming Australian movie Red Dog. Koko, Australia’s answer to celebrity dog Marley, who stars in Marley and Me alongside Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, is being kept in isolation so that his training is not interfered with. Yes the story is a parody of ridiculous celebrity culture, but it is the very same culture the Herald Sun so hungrily perpetuates to sell newspapers. The satire is lost amongst the cases of genuine celebrity fodder such as “our favourite wags” as voted by the public last week.   

Kyle and Jackie O and still battling it out about their ridiculous stunt with a lie detector and a teenage girl who claimed to have been raped (Wednesday page 2). It is such a shame that the girl’s family and the presenters of the show are still arguing over the train wreck of an interview. In the words of The Beatles, let it be.

I cannot believe that the Koala story is not dead – the Koala itself is, but the story just keeps on churning. Apparently there are just not enough sentimental words to say about such a special animal. Whilst it appears that Sam was “a symbol of hope” in the midst of such a tragic event, I just can’t believe that it is still circulating in the news. I am a huge animal lover and don’t want to trivialise animal lives but every time I drive to my hometown of Ballarat to visit my family I see at least two dead koalas on the side of the road. Fourteen hundred Tamil people died in Sri Lankan conflict this week, but it didn’t even get a mention. Journalism is responsible for informing the public about local, national and international news. Many people base their entire ideas of what is currently important in the world around them based on the news they are presented with. For this reason I had to sit through a conversation with a group of people I work with who thought that Sam the Koala’s death was the most important issue in the world at the moment. Media outlets have an ethical obligation to provide people with the news they need, not just the sugar coated news they may want.

I know I’m supposed to read widely, being a journalism student and all, but I have to admit that I hate the Herald Sun. Whether in hard copy or online it just doesn’t bake my potato for some reason. I have it delivered to my door every Saturday and Sunday (I just forgo the subscription I have to pick up in building 6 during the week) and bring it inside and throw it on a pile of Herald Sun newspapers as tall as I am. I feel too guilty about the paper and paperboy wastage that I can’t bring myself to throw them away so I just let them build up next to my front door. I hate sport so maybe the fact that the Sunday Herald Sun is 95 per cent sport orientated probably doesn’t help its cause. I can’t explain it because my parents read it and it is the only newspaper ordered where I work so I should surely have warmed to it by now. Maybe it’s the front pages that deter me.     

Animal stories are cute, quirky and definitely draw an affectionate ‘aaw’ out of readers. But how is it that a koala (albeit Victoria’s celebrity koala) managed to make the front page of the Herald Sun today? Yes, it’s sad that the poster animal for the Black Saturday fires had to be put down because she had Chlamydia, but surely something more significant happened in the world today? Oh yes, wait, US news anchor for CNBC, Erin Burnett, who moonlights as a topless covergirl for Maxim magazine accused Kevin Rudd of ‘camelside’ because he approved the culling of feral camels in the outback. Also in breaking news today there was finally a ‘potential witness’ who ‘may have’ significant information on the Madeline McCann case. How ill informed I would have been about the world today if I hadn’t been at work on my lunchbreak with only the Herald Sun to read. Although I’d bet all my student dollars that I could probably have gotten the same content from the next issue of Woman’s Day.  

My name is Alex and I’m a journalism student at RMIT. I will be blogging for an on-line journalism assignment. I’m not so keen on blogging though so bear with me while I work it out! I’m not 100 per cent sure what my blog will be about but it will definitely focus on current local and international news.