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Ch 8: Mobile and Social Media in Your Career

This Chapter really tries to tie in everything together. Right off the bat, we get anecdotes of emerging Journalists entering the job market and how they effectively showcased their abilities across multiple media platforms, tools and devices, all in a steadfast effort to land that first gig. Now, getting the job is never easy, but it certainly helps when employers showcase exactly the kinds of skills that they seek from their potential hires, which helps to utilize and properly navigate one's application or resume with the correct and appropriate sort of content. This is why, in my personal job searches, I have found it to be extremely frustrating when employers essentially say that they want, for lack of a better word, everything. Sure, it is important to know how to edit photos on an Adobe Photoshop level of detail, even on mobile devices (Snapseed is a godsend for that level of editing with photos). It's also important to know how to configure the levels on a ZOOM H4n, get your lavalier mic hooked up, and know which fifteen seconds of the subsequent audio and video you are going to upload as part of your twitter sound bites. What does not seem to work, in regards to the slate of criteria one needs to meet to merely exist as a potential hire in news media, is the idea that this is justifiably feasible on an individual person, but I digress. After all, your first job is practically a bootcamp for news reporting, and that can still apply even with the next section of the chapter in mind: Social Media positions at publications.

Social media has become so immensely vast and expansive that in order for publications to really get their footing and be memorable in the eyes and minds of their readers. This is why social media managers and editor positions have become so commonplace, especially with startups and marketing agencies. Developing, advertising and protecting a brand is essential to the visibility and success of pretty much every single enterprise or service. The fact that this is oftentimes its own position makes it a wonderful opportunity for Journalists starting out, as this new generation of Journalists absolutely has a strong grasp on social media given their earlier exposure to it that already established Journalists. In order to optimize social media posts, we as Journalists have to carefully curate and drip-feed content to consumers in a way that is compelling enough for viewers to garner a genuine vested intertest in the bigger picture surrounding the aforementioned content we post. It is basically drip-feeding clickbait on the internet, but with actual payoff as opposed to clicking through multiple windows and collecting advertising cookies. With legitimate news sources, it is more so a question of "how do we get viewers to see and read these articles we worked so hard on reporting wise?"

As for the next section, which really just explains how to dive into the job market and figure out what you want to do, I found it to be honestly an irritating and redundant section to read. As someone who puts in the work to constantly be applying and putting myself out there on job postings in basically every single crevice of the internet, I felt insulted. I have been on so many websites of an absurd amount of publications, scouring both that and LinkedIn for over 3 years in search of, at absolute bare minimum, a paid internship, which, even with my qualifications, was still asking for too much, even at the present. Over the Pandemic, I went and did a virtual Internship as an Editor for an Industry Trade Publication covering PoC representation in the entertainment industry.

You read that correctly

An Editor, not an assistant to an Editor, or a flat out intern. The EDITOR of the TV Section of an actual publication, where I oversaw a team of five writers, edited their work, collaborated on pitches, and steered the damn ship in an unpaid internship. You do not need me to tell you how phenomenally absurd that is. The immense saturation and difficulty of this industry's market is horrifically understated, especially in a world where nobody is truly economically safe from anything, much less living in or near LA. So yes, I find this section to be really asinine and tone deaf, we are all trying so hard to land jobs using these exact methods as it is, so very hard.

The rest of the chapter is informative. Being a self-starter is certainly important in a world as ever evolving as ours. I found the tip about cultivating your brand to be important but similarly redundant. The fact that we simply are required to be using social media to even stand a chance of getting a job is insane, especially given how toxic and detrimental social media can be for one's health, but in the role of a Journalist, I understand the implications. We steer clear of that, simply divulging the news and the news only.

My favorite part of the Chapter, and the part I learned the most from, was how to write a Cover Letter. That section of job apps has been a blur for me, and I am thankful that, by sheer coincidence, I have been following the format set forth in this chapter. What a relief!

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Stereotypes. They are our incessant societal burden as writers and informers of human stories and experiences. To understand their impact and damaging potential against marginalized groups, we ought to look at how stereotypes, which are gross misattributions and false equivalencies that target a specific group, whether it be an ethnic minority, gender or disabled minorities. At the end of the day, nobody is truly left unscathed from stereotypes. Take it from me, a second generation Armenian-American. Armenians have a wide plethora of different stereotypes, whether it be the idea that we all drive BMWs and Mercedes cars (and drive them horribly), that we're all absurdly alt-right conservative or that we only have three general occupations; auto mechanic, lawyer/doctor or a master fraudmaker. Now, while there are certainly confirmations of stereotypes across multiple ethnicities and other groups, Armenians included, the lapse and detriment of stereotypes really boil down to the fact that they exist as generalizations. Look at me, I'm Armenian and a center-left Journalist/Screenwriter that drives a Kia with zero traffic tickets, a total counter example to pretty much every aforementioned Armenian stereotype.

The best way to really combat these stereotypes and how they negatively impact different communities is to highlight these communities and share stories of people who utterly shatter these stereotypes, leading to more diversity of thought and perception in the public space. If we, as writers and Journalists, fail to observe the immense variety and personality that surrounds the communities we live in and thrive in, we fail said communities if we put its members under the dangerous implications of ideas that typically motivate hatespeech. We have seen it manifest in crimes and mass shootings against Asian people and LGBT people in America. We can't let this fester and worsen.

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Chapter 7: Social Media Ethics

Man, I have been waiting for this chapter since we started our blog post coverage of the book. To keep things concise, this chapter is about redefining ethics in social media as a journalist. Most Journalists have, assuming they received a complete education, learned of the various principles that govern their work, whether it be truth, fairness, verification or balance. These factors all play a consistent central role to the pursuit of Journalism, and we have to have a serious conversation about the principles that guide us. more importantly, we need to know if these factors can truly withstand this echoing chamber of informational noise we have come to know as social media. I loved that this chapter immediately talks about the SPJ Code of Ethics, going into it one component at a time. I found it interesting that ONA had its own website that basically allows you to build your own Code of Ethics, but it also had me raise a few questions. When it comes to ethics and principles, there is the unspoken mantra that these ideals are strictly part of an end-product of sorts the strive for, namely a well-written, honestly reported piece. However, if ethics vary from publication to publication, what does it say towards the idea of ethics in general? Is it a rule book, or a series of suggestions? How seriously should we take the concept of ethics if the way they are employed through policies are scattershot and inconsistent at best? There appears to be a pattern of subjective discretion with these objective ideals, and that's something that really concerns me. I feel that this idea might be the cause and impetus for why consolidated media outlets have given rise to politically aggravated narratives that stray far from truth and far towards sensationalism. If we do not combat that, particularly with a widespread conversation within the profession, what does that say about our abilities, not as writers, but as stenographers of the human experience?

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CH 6: From the Field, Social Media Analytics

This chapter focuses on optimizing the news and information you share and report on social media in order to provide the best information for your audience. The first of the methods that help achieve this is Social Media Optimization (SMO), which is the primary way that posts garner engagement and interaction on social media. Ultimately, people spend less time on websites and more time on social media, so that is where you will have to primarily engage with your audience as a Journalist. SMO is a combination of using hashtags, good photos and easy to follow links when crafting your posts on Twitter or Facebook. One thing that I have definitely noticed, especially in the age of social media, is the abundance of graphics and infographics, often to point of just absolutely smothering a post's content in favor of sheer visuals. Why? People have less time to view things, and even if they did have time, their attention spans have been halved by the scourge to humanity that is Facebook, but I digress. In addition to using hashtags and hyperlinks, the chapter stresses the importance of still trying to incorporate strong writing into one's posts. While I may be cynical about social media as a whole, I still see the merits of being able to say something meaningful and profound in less than a ten word sentence, which is a skill every person, not just Journalist, should strive for. Starting with a critical post and then following it up with short bursts of info to sustain said post is the strongest way of organizing your posting schedules. Following it up with conversations are the best way to maintain momentum and relevancy in social media. The latter half of the chapter dives into analytics and how the Nielsen ratings systems do not apply to social media, but the main thing I have gathered from this chapter is that, while it is definitely easy to search and organize analytics about you on the internet through organizational repositories and hashtags, this chapter insinuates that there is a formula of sorts to achieving the Journalistic equivalent to virality, which just is not an attainable metric, as we are gambling on the collective, disorganized hyperfixations of multiple audiences converging on a singular news story or topic, which is not a common occurrence outside of large media outlets that control the influx of information.

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Sinclair Scenario

There are just so many things wrong with the Sinclair Media Group that this scenario does not seem particularly unlikely or far from reality. Let's look into the various aspects of the scenario. I would have already been working for the Sinclair Media Group for six months anyway by the time this promotion opportunity would have presented itself. The primary flaw that I find here in this situation has far less to do with politics than I expected, as I find the idea of forcing someone to donate to anything and leveraging their career against them to be inherently extortionist and beyond a political partisan problem. This is an employer problem. No person should have their livelihood and prosperity toyed with like that, as all jobs should strive to be a meritocratic system of promotion. Simply put, you get the job if you are objectively the best at it while also the easiest to work with. A forced donation goes against the entire principle of a donation, which is voluntary to begin with. Forgive my pragmatism and cynicism, but let's look at this situation with a brutally honest lens. The reason why Sinclair employs and attracts so many people from the workforce, even with opposing political views, is because they have the capacity to offer wages, employment and opportunity to Journalists, plenty of whom who are unemployed, struggling in debt, bordering homelessness and in bleak spirits. Dollars dispel desperation. As for the scenario, there is a strong chance that, even with the wages that Sinclair offers (starting around 29K at entry level positions), that I, as a young reporter or media analyst, would not even be able to afford giving a sizeable donation to begin with, depending on my cost of living. At the end of the day, in a fiscally unforgiving industry like media, I have to go with the best opportunity I have in order to quite literally survive. Politically, I do not support Sinclair or their blatantly skewed agendas, but if I were already working there for six months in this scenario, then perhaps it isn't a non-starter and remained on the table nonetheless. Maybe media isn't as principled as we ought to believe, because if it were, this situation of politically motivated funding decisions would have never come to be, quite frankly. Would I take the promotion? If I could afford to live on my own, especially in a place like California? I am going to be completely honest, I would take the money. Our generation has had to jump through far more hoops than any other generation for far fewer benefits, so why would I compromise my own wellbeing? Certainly, it may be selfish to think this way, but when we are all trying to navigate a very intense and relentless job market, I am going to choose my strongest means of achieving a comfortable living. Now, if this were to bite me back in the future, I'd certainly expect that, as donating to PACs in general is a very bad look for the sake of integrity, but I have no problem with establishing conversation around my actions and openly explaining my story. After all, there are plenty of Journalists who have done things of similar caliber and chose to keep it private, so in a roundabout way, I am actually behaving with far more transparency and with more Journalist intent by illuminating an evil corporate greed, even if I have benefitted from it.

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Ch 5: The Mobile Journalist

There is something awfully cathartic about this chapter, as it leans into the advancement of new tech in the rapidly changing field of reporting, advocating on ho w to properly and efficiently use your phone while out in the field with limited resources. Cellphones are undoubtedly a blessing, as it enables us, with its modular attachments and capacities, to retrofit and rapidly change the focus and specializations of the phone into whatever we would need it to do, whether we want to set up a lav mic receiver, a credit card swiper, an external light source, or even a large cinema monitor (though why anyone would ever choose to make that decision is utterly beyond me).

I love that the chapter instructs us on how to actually pitch things, and also allows us to include tech and social media in every step along the way. The steps to a pitch are, as instructed:

Story Focus

News Peg

Sources

Data

Visuals

Newsgathering

Distribution

Engagement

The second half of these steps are more of the "principal photography/active development" stages of news reporting and journalism, and it helps to ascertain a certain workflow with an adaptable mindset in order to give the absolute best shot you got while reporting, because, at the end of the day, we are human and cannot possibly gather every single detail of what happened in every situation.

There is an entire section of this chapter regarding live-tweeting and livestreaming. While I've had to really get into gear with the live-tweeting mindset in previous reporting classes, I can't say I've actually been academically instructed on how to use livestreaming to my advantage. It has typically only worked with larger news entities, like the The Daily Wire and The Young Turks, two news organizations with major investments and high production value, which opens so many doors of misconception in the process.

I found the flexibility sections to be actually very practical, as I can easily myself using a video editing app on my phone if I cannot access my pirated copy of Adobe Premiere Pro on my laptop. It is better to have something that you rarely use but might need instead of not having that same resource and needing it in a critical moment, Filmic Pro is definitely a resource like that on mt radar.

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Should this Photo or Video Have Been Published/Reflection

This presentation delved into the task of taking up the ethical and moral dilemma surrounding the idea of pre-censorship in media, and whether we should allow ourselves to publish photos that are controversial, violent or graphic in nature. As a result, we Journalists are faced with the ultimatum of choosing whether or not an image should be shown to the public. We were shown numerous examples of this, with my personal favorites being The Vulture and the Girl as well as The Falling Man. When I say favorite, I do not say it with joy, as both of these images are extremely eerie and daunting in every regard, but both invoked different aspects of human tragedy, with the former actually shining light on the famine in Sudan in the early 1990s. The subsequent media attention surrounding the photo provided humanitarian aid and helped in enacting actual change towards the betterment of those affected by the famine.

I feel that The Vulture and the Little Girl is an excellent example of how I conduct my personal Editing Conscience with a single question: "Does it add or generate substantial conversation?"

In this case, it certainly does, but The Falling Man is a fundamentally different photo of an unprecedented terrorism event that left a nation scarred for literal decades. The various images of mid-explosion skyscrapers and rubble were already enough to send people into horrific depths. While the image of a man falling to his death to avoid burning alive is incredibly profound, one could definitely make the argument that it was unnecessarily published at a time where there was collective pain and anguish being constantly discussed on the news, bordering on the needlessly exploitative.

The inverse falls back to the same idea that people need to see as much of the truth as soon as possible. Aeropagitica, I guess.

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CH 4: Mastering Social Media and Mobile Apps for Reporting

This Chapter is far less about mindset and approach in the digital space, but rather the application and direct understanding of the lingo and culture behind most essential social media platforms. Besides going into geo-tags, mentions and hyperlinking on social media, I found most of the auxiliary information at the start of this chapter to be fairly handy and practical, especially since we, as casual users of the target demographic of platforms like Twitter and Instagram, are often not aware of the wide variety of tools and resources available at our disposal on the internet.

I have a slight tangential footnote regarding something I found somewhat amusing. The book was written before Twitter upped its word-count to double that of 140 characters, which is not a big deal in the slightest due to its recency, but funny nonetheless.

The Chapter discusses how to directly use four social media platforms effectively: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. All four of them have their own styles and pathways of communication while serving different demographics and branding needs. I found the emphasis on LinkedIn and Twitter to be fascinating, as our generation tends to make comedy out of LinkedIn for its business/job centric platform and cadence, despite it being arguably one of the best tools in any industry professional's arsenal.

I found the vast swath of Twitter-specific words and lingo to be overwhelming, but it helps to put things into perspective and logically understand the user interface and design logic in every way, from both a consumer and professional perspective. By navigating these digital paths, we, as journalists are able to successfully use these social media platforms to our advantage.

The last leg of this chapter makes a brief footnote about Snapchat, but it is clear that, as a social media platform, it is not really catered to Journalists in general, as the direct messaging nature of the app is unintuitive for the spread of news.

Additionally, the chapter concludes with strategies to dissect and properly assess the news sources that often yield insightful stories and perspectives by simply...finding them? Ultimately, this is all just a matter of looking and seeking digitally until you find a grassroots group or a given specialized news source.

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Ch 3: Your Social Media Brand

This Chapter is a breath of fresh air regarding social media and its utility in the employment process, particularly as a multimedia Journalist graduating an entering the workforce in a saturated and oftentimes exploitative digital age. With all things considered, this chapter has provided me with a checklist of essentials to evaluate and maintain while building a brand and expanding your social media presence.

Firstly, the idea of constantly engaging with similar accounts is something that I've heard previously, but I've had a hard time doing diligently. In the media industry, engagement is certainly easier than engaging in the world of entertainment solely due to the margins in which one can generate controversy and a back-and-forth level of engagement. By saying controversy, I mean that in the sense that your opinion differs and alters discourse, without necessarily opting into hateful rhetoric and discourse. Your conversations can be both controversial and still insightful/meaningful.

Now that brings me to content. Knowing what to write about, and sticking to it patternistically is essentially to understanding yourself and making yourself clear and concise in your presence. Brands have to be distinct, whether it be a brand of humor or information. In my case, while my background is primarily in entertainment (Film, TV and Music) journalism, I find that my reporting does not necessarily need to be limited to that, although the majority of my content should focus on my specialties, as that is what will aid my brand the most.

Converting my social media to reflect my personality and professional interests are crucial to progressing forward in the digital social media space. I've found that Twitter is perhaps the strongest tool for digital journalists as the ability to provide, short, succinct and timely news at a high frequency will inevitably be more appealing and accessible to most people.

Lastly, my favorite part of this chapter was the brief tangent regarding search optimizations and how employers search up applicants. Searching myself up made me feel much much better about my potential in the industry (having a medium page, staff page at The Sundial and my own portfolio page show up on the first page made me feel much much better.) Despite this, I have plenty of work moving forward.

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Thoughts: Is Media Conservative or Liberal?

This question is fundamentally complicated and does not have an outright direct answer. There are simply too many factors in motion to nail it down to a single sentence. The best we can do is dissect the components one by one and compare them as it relates to a news network in a liberal sphere and a conservative network.

The first thing to discuss is patterns in media. The patterns of a given publication typically indicate their response towards news, and a publication will typically respond negatively towards a popular news event if it harms their financial ends, their livelihood. While most news publications do strive to tell the truth and report with honesty, I feel that the slant and politics found in the news industry often rises out from the whole question of discretion. This falls on the Editors and head writers that often assign and delegate the news stories in major publications.

My opinion rests on the patternistic trends that I have picked up on while taking the liberty of exploring the different archived webpages of well-established political slants within the New York Times and the One American News network. The main factor and pattern I keep finding is actually a shared characteristic between two polar opposite political slants; both effectively ignore and/or diminish the visibility of a news story that negatively affects a given political orientation/political party's image. This is honestly the only true substantive way to scientifically prove a publication's given political biases, as no legitimate news publication would dare to associate themselves to a particular political ideology, as it would alienate anyone who does not subscribe to that publication's views, and that works inherently against a broad reaching publication's interests.

I'll insert myself as an example for the sake of demonstration. I would never, in any unironic situation, visit Breitbart News for entertainment, let alone for gathering news, because I, as a customer, do not subscribe to the rhetoric of a primarily alt-right publication. I find the story of the titular Andrew Breitbart to be incredibly fascinating as an originally liberal and wealthy individual effectively polarizing into the alt-right political sphere and trailblazing the idea of niche conservative media into a profitable space. For that, he is effectively a business genius for making any sort of news media at all profitable in the digital age, particularly around the time of Breitbart News's rise, which was at the turn of the last decade. Despite this, Breitbart's news articles have become notable for effectively mobilizing and promoting hate crimes and tumult towards transgender communities following a series of op-ed pieces penned by then-Editor in Chief Milo Yiannopoulos, who oversought Breitbart's effective transformation from a right-leaning news publication to a politically conservative think tank and reactionary platform.

I bring up Breitbart to illustrate the ways in which media can be weaponized and directed towards marginalized groups under the pretense of news, although that is a phenomenally rare occurrence. What typically happens in far-right and far-left publications is the neglect and disregard for news stories and story details that shed a negative light on an individual or organization tied to a political orientation.

Take, for example, The Washington Post's and NBC's coverage of the Nick Sandmann incident. This story was unavoidable as a result of its virality due to the simple fact that the visual of a MAGA hat carried an immense social and political impact. It's mere emergence on Twitter shattered major news outlets as they scrambled to interview the main actors involved, with a social media frenzy occurring persistently throughout.

To blame The Washington Post for the relentlessness of the story would be a misguided counterattack at best, as the communities of a social media platform like Twitter were instrumental in the discourse and perception of the actors involved in that story. At that point, the conversation starts to drift along the lines of more ideological concepts like the extent of free speech and whether the Internet falls within it (spoiler alert, it does. Even the median-age-of-65 Supreme Court ruled so in 1997.)

In terms of what the news generally aspires to accomplish, it is fundamentally against the best business and integrity interests of the Journalism industry to deliberately polarize an audience, as it adversely fragments news publications and weakens their financial sustainability. If we were to include network tv news into the conversation, we'd be having a far different conversation regarding the integrity of news journalism, as publications are held to a very different standard of media law than tv entertainment news, which is typically less foundationally true in terms of news than a written piece, as news hosts like Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson rely on their opinionated delivery of specifically curated news stories to attract hyperpoliticized audiences.

I hold, without any particular cases of evidence, the opinion that network tv news is baselessly insulting to the concept of Journalism, and is inherently disingenuous.

As for digital news and effectively all other forms of news, I find that, given my knowledge obtained from research in past presentations and reading, that publications do not deliberately choose to politicize their audiences, for the sake of preventing deterrence of potential readers. Polarizing publications are typically the exception, not the norm, but who knows how or when it will change.

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Ch 2: Managing Change: Mobile First

This chapter is about the metamorphosis of the news media industry in its transition from print to digital journalism. Following the economic recession of 2007, there was a vast number of layoffs, as this economic turmoil, combined with the rise of social media, quite literally cut the value of the newspaper industry in half. In order to survive, many newspapers have adopted a mobile-first mindset in both the business and organizational reporting aspects of the industry. This chapter breaks down each component of what makes a comprehensive mobile-first approach within a news media publication. The first component centers on a business aspect of the craft by focusing on the audience experiences, which boils down to engagement, something previously aforementioned in the first chapter as an essential tenet of a Journalist's method of responding to their now active audience. The second idea is a raw reflection of the current status of Journalism as inherently multimedia. Combine that with a tasteful user interface, and you have a Multiplatform Hub of Content, which usually manifests itself as a table of contents that a user could easily navigate to reach the category of content that they want. The third factor revolves around the trends of business models as they shift and flutter from new subscription ideas. One of these ideas is the idea of a microtransactional paywall, where a user gets a number of free articles per months. TV stations and cable news have also upped their social media presence in order to maintain relevancy in the primarily mobile young audience. Some news media outlets opt for a social-media only approach, which is a concept unfathomable to any newscaster ten years ago. Additionally, many news publications have begun to see growth in off-air events, like the annual New York Times show. Another new medium of approach is the advent of podcasts and the potential in revenue from there, given its newfound popularity. The chapter concludes by diving into the link between the business side of Journalism and how it blends with the Editorial side of the industry.

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Ch 1: Forces At The Gate

The first chapter of our book begins with laying the foundations one would need to assess the scale and impact of modern technology and how it relates to the Journalism industry as a whole. The book extensively covers the vastly accelerating pace of technology and how it has impacted both the speed and circulation of information throughout the world. The author makes a note of something I have heard discussed in my classes, but never within an academic book; this book delves into engagement. Interaction, on a fundamental level, is definitely one of the stranger mechanics that Journalists have to successfully utilize, as the nature of reporting and its audience has changed, and it is within our collective best interests to focus on adapting by essentially being "in the know" with all of our new technologies. Prior to the immediacy of social media's platform of discourse, news media had a one-way influx of communication to a relatively passive audience, which has changed drastically since the boom of platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

Social media subverts, quite literally, every previously mentioned component of the traditional model of Journalism and its engagement of everyday audiences. Due to the immediacy of social media, Journalism is a two-way conversation with an active audience now, and that comes with caveats of, first off, saturation due to an influx of information, raw data and opinions. This new set of circumstances forces Journalists to adapt to new rules of engagement designed for discourse in a primarily digital space. These new rules center on three basic, broad ideas to keep track of and regularly practice in order to improve one's professional social skills. Firstly, one must have consistent and authentic interactions. While the authenticity aspect of this note is typically a given, I cannot stress, as a Twitter user who has previously run a Music Review journalism blog, how important it is to interact with similar accounts consistently and regularly. Social media engagement is effectively a second job on its own, but effective use of it will take you so far. The second rule is to have a professional and informal tone. This is an idea that can be put into practice by following the diction of broadcast news anchors and lead reporters on local news stations. These industry positions often require this paradoxical speech style. Lastly, responsiveness with your audience. Similarly to how youtubers try to generate engagement with their audiences by interacting with their comments, Journalists must follow the same idea. By interacting, this generates further discourse and prompts the spread of more information.

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Deepfakes: Why Must WE be Wary?

Deepfaking. We know about this as a variation of an old concept reinvented in a digital world. This is effectively doctoring information and data in a presentable, digestible and easily circulated manner. Aside from its barebones conceptual standing, deepfakes are the visual information misnomer of social media. The entire weight of the deepfake rests on initially convincing the majority of people watching to assume that the video or audio shown is clearly real. Most people will not take a second look at a deepfaked video, especially if the content being presented to them is inherently appealing to their personal biases and beliefs, which is where the profit motive of consumerist data collection companies comes into play, like a digital marketing equivalent of a chess game. Pushing an agenda, at that point, remains a trivial and rapid-production effort, especially on social media platforms whose information channels rely on catalyzing virality in the millions of posts that circulate throughout.

Detecting a deepfake is a difficult task, because it requires the audience member and social media users in question to knowingly expose themselves to deepfakes, therefore raising the question of whether the influx of information, no matter how false, would be a net positive or negative in modern discourse. yet, that leads into a larger, more philosophical question of whether we have the right to supersede the currents of known information and control it as journalists. We could have the power to "play God" with our images and words, which is something that I find concerning given that the goodwill of the Journalism industry can be easily distorted by the vices of greed and acclaim. Doctored information has had precedented use in past controversies when it came to award winning journalistic work.

Janet Cooke famously wrote an article in the 1980s for the Washington Post about a heroin addicted child, which won a Pulitzer Prize after Editor-in-Chief Bob Woodward (yes, that very same Woodward that took down President Nixon with the Pentagon Papers) submitted it for consideration, despite some dissent amongst the editorial staff over discrepancies in Cooke's reporting. Years later, it was found that she fabricated everything, which she admitted to doing, and returned her Pulitzer.

If Bob Woodward, the literal posterchild of perceptive reporting and master of piercing through doctored information, was unable to see the flaws in his own publication's work in the 1980's, I have a personally very hard time believing that a regular staff editor at a loal publication would even fathom the possibility. The margin of human error is problematic, and that is without even considering the aspect of modern technology and deepfakes.

Deepfakes become easier to spot visually as time goes by, as some face-changing software fail to properly adapt to the facial movements of deepfaked individuals, leading to a painfully obvious rendering error in post-processing. However, incredibly well-done deepfakes are scarily difficult to distinguish, to the point of invoking a sentiment of body horror rooted in the uncanny valley. Simply put, this AI-interfacing can and already is being weaponized by any actor with access to the technology in order to further the interests of said actor, regardless of whatever it may be. We have seen this play out in entertainment media with the famous feud between singer and songwriter Taylor Swift and celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in which the couple doctored an interview and phone call in which Taylor supposedly consented to the rapper Ye calling her a "b*tch" in his song "Famous." Truth be told, there was no permission given on her behalf, just a false premonition turned into a tangible lie. What's to say that mainstream media companies wouldn't eventually do the same to further their political interests?

I can't truly find a legitimate reason as to why deepfakes would actually serve to help us, as in, human society, in any way, simply on the basis that the sole purpose of a deepfake is to be disingenuous. It is literally in the name "deepfake." This is a confirmation to me personally, as my ideology regarding deepfakes and much of the internet is that we, as a society, were not and will be capable of being ready for social media, instant gratification and constant stimulation. The perpetual numbness of the digital world has now become part of its design, and the deepfaking world is an extension of that.

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Regarding Covington High and the Protest Mess:

Though we, in the context of American society, have had this story held "on blast" for effectively months following the news breaking on mainstream media outlets like CNN and Fox, and particularly "old" media like the New York Times and The Washington Post, we have not truly been given a collective debriefing on all of the details regarding the story as a whole. This is, invariably due to a key factor that determines the trends of sensationalism in media in the current day: The Profit Motive. Now, I'll begin by essentially dissecting the events as they occurred. Students from Covington Catholic High School gathered in Washinton DC to protest abortions. Meanwhile, there was a Native American-led protest group that was conducting its own protest regarding Native American rights. These groups merely conducted their protests independently from each other, while a third protest group, led by the Black Israelites, was conducting their own protest. As the three groups moved closer in proximity to each other, tensions rose, leading to a back and forth between the Black Israelites and the High Schoolers, including exchanges of slurs and epithets. A number of high schoolers were wearing "Make America Great Again" hats. This was a detail essential to the rollout of subsequent media coverage. The Native American group marched by and as the two groups made exchanges, the Native Americans moved closer, leading to the two groups having a head-on confrontation where Nathan Phillips, a member of the Ohama tribe, walked up to a high schooler named Nick Sandmann while beating a drum and humming. Sandmann and Phillips faced each other while the surrounding crowds of kids and Native Americans began an altercation that soon became swamped in a mass hysteria over news networks for weeks on end. It was an insufferably bloated news story coverage cycle on 24 hour syndicated news networks, with hyperpolitization at an extreme high, but this allows us to study the political spin and virality of sensationalism at an academic level, to understand how different media outlets observe and analyze a story.

With that in mind, let's look at how left-leaning political outlets responded to the story, which originally broke on Twitter. Initial coverage portrayed Sandmann as the aggressor in the confrontation, making note of his appearance; white male, wearing a Make America Great Again Hat with a grin. This carried a certain stigma to the audience of most left leaning outlets, as there is an immense branding association and political subtext to the infamous "MAGA" hat. For left-leaning people at that particular point in time, it was something akin to a symbol of hate and hatespeech. This was subliminally utilized by left-leaning media to capitalize on controversy and provoke discourse, which did work. Right leaning outlets victimized the children, as the MAGA hat carried an inverse triumphance among right leaning individuals at that time. Both outlets made a note of heavily enforcing the hyperfocused climax of Phillips and Sandmann staring each other down. Both outlets made a point of largely ignoring the Black Israelites' involvement in the entire altercation.

At the time, my news media consumption was heavily left-leaning, and upon further exploring the story, I was shocked to find that none of the outlets I read had mentioned that. I didn't even know the Black Israelits existed until my college professor spoke about it in a political science class! This entire story infuriated me at the time and infuriates me now; it felt like an overblown, soap-opera level controversy filled with anger and dissent that was fueled more by resulting discourse, rather than the actual merit of the story itself. To me, it was a shameful point in journalism.

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Important images over the Holiday Break and of early 2022

This is an overhead picture of the Thwaites Glacier, which is the largest glacier in the world. As of December 2021, this glacier is now projected to be the biggest threat to the rising of seal levels globally, as the glacier's anchoring ice shelf is set to collapse within 5 years if nothing is done abut global rising temperatures. The Thwaites Glacier is roughly the size of Rhode Island, and will devastate local ecosystems if dislodged and melted away, leading to a sever acceleration of the current climate crisis.

The image, though grandiose and bright without context, is profoundly eerie as the sight of an eventual environmental disaster provides a certain gloom that most images struggle to retain. What makes this image unique is its nature as a photo. Most photographs are inherently fixated on the snapshot of a past person or event, while this image, as it exists in the present day, is more of a harbinger looking outward into the prediction of an event.

The image is also highly unusual, as there is no human subject and is merely a landscape wide-shot. While it typically makes sense to convey a human interest story with a human subject, this story foretells a tale of apocalypse with grandiose, lush imagery. This glacier is representative of the damage we, as a human species have done against the planet and its environment.

Afghanistan at the beginning of September of 2022. While this news event did not happen in the last two months, I've found the imagery surrounding the entire humanitarian crisis to be extremely profound and moving due to the context (and visual technique employed in this image published.) In late August of 2021, the United States announced its plans to fully withdraw from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to rapidly reclaiming liberated areas of the country and usurp power governmentally. The fears of the residents still trapped in the country were unfortunately soon realized, as the newly installed Taliban leaders reinstated Shariah Law as rule. The despair of this sociopolitical situation is drearily reflected in the imagery of the abandoned people outside the airstrip in Kabul.

This image reflects the pain, sorrow and dread of a placid populace suffering from terrorism and civil unrest as they see their only remaining effective allies abandon them after failing to fulfill their mission. The image over the desert plains can be likened metaphorically to the discourse and debate surrounding the controversial move made by the US Military, while physically manifesting the weariness of a people long tormented by the absence of peace and tranquil freedom. The bleakness of the setting sun only increases this overwhelming feeling of despair as a pathway to a more empathetic conversation on foreign events.

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My name’s Edward Nenedzhyan, and I am a Senior studying General Journalism, although my background has always been rooted in a different variety of things. My background has always been musical, as I’ve known how to write music on guitar, bass and drums for the past ten years or so. I was encouraged in high school to sharpen my writing and my interests as a news junkie steered me towards the path of Journalism, although this was at the start of my college experience, which has shaped me towards creative writing since the start of the pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, I took an internship at an industry trade web magazine as the Editor for the TV Section, which kindled my old passions for film and tv, which has steered me towards learning script coverage and screenwriting. I hope to work at least in Entertainment Media as reporter, but I would ideally like to be a screenwriter of scripty for film productions or agencies. I Ideally want to firmly have a role/job/career in the film industry, as I’ve also spent a lot of time with audio mixing/balancing in DAWs as well as working with Adobe Premiere Pro. Through gathering editing experience in multimedia classes, I became reinvigorated with the art of storytelling, and I truly hope that my skills will take me where I want to go within the next five years.