Persuasive Blog Article, Research Paper Example

Emerging media is changing the very mechanics of public debate. Only ten years ago, the news that was reported today, may have happened yesterday or the day before. It would have been gathered by professional photographers and journalists who were trained to look for those things that matter to our lives. They would shed light on those events and compose a rounded look at their costs and benefits. Each piece involved talented reporters, producers, directors and executives, each helping us decide what bearing those events had on us. Now, nearly everyone has cheap access to powerful tools, and a free way to distribute content. With blogs, social networks, boutique news sites, outlets that mix news with sarcasm, humor, or fiction, the news sources that feed our public discourse are more numerous, more diverse, more fragmented, more specialized, and more opinionated than ever.

This instant diffusion of fact into all of these different brands of information makes it increasingly difficult to have a focused public debate. The viewer must now collect their own raw material from as many sources as they can and assemble their own picture of events. Essentially, people have to become their own journalists.

This is not just a new game. This is a new field for public discourse. There are new players, new fans, new referees, new coaches, new owners, new teams and certainly new rules. Let’s look at how emerging media may effect our political process from the point of view of the candidate running for office, from the point of view of the citizen making educated choices, and from the point of view of a government trying to conduct a public conversation.

Naheed Nenshi, the newly-elected Mayor of Calgary, brilliantly leveraged social networks and emerging media to win his election. He engaged over 16,000 followers on Facebook, thousands more on Twitter, provided one-click access to volunteer, donate, download collateral, download apps for mobile devices, view focused video presentations, and read a blog about his daily events. But it is not enough for a small campaign to produce streams of content for people to absorb. The challenge for a small campaign is remaining consistent across all of these streams. Even though the media is diverse, the goal of that campaign is to build and maintain one focused public perception.

Nenshi’s success came from his ability to hold a focused public conversation regardless of medium. Every time Naheed produced something for public consumption, he released content that reinforced a series of main themes, allowed people to comment on it, called people to take specific action, gave people a way to take ownership of the process and gave them a vehicle to pass along his message through whichever medium they were comfortable with. Not only can you read Nenshi’s ideas for change on his Facebook page, but as his base grows, you sense the energy and excitement mount as more people get involved. For hardcore users of these streams, these small organizations can provide a constant stream of excitement for them to consume. As public excitement grows, candidates can make ambassadors out of fans and volunteers out of ambassadors.

The new news is not a one-way feed anymore, it is now a multi-lateral public conversation. The subject of the news articles, the pundits and the consumers of news may all contribute. Lets look at some of the benefits and dangers to this new dynamic.

Because there are so many more people reporting on a given event there are many more vantage points from which a given news event may be viewed. One might believe that increasing the pool of reporters might result in increased overall transparency. This may be true, but as the number of news sources increases, the audience for each source decreases. So, if one news source finds something out that another did not have the access or resources to, that information may not make it to as broad an audience.

The diffusion of media sources disempowers the government’s ability to control the release of information as well. This hinders their ability to misdirect the public with propaganda or disinformation.

As new news source shrink and their resources thin, the ability of each reporter to dig deep into a story is reduced. There is less time and money devoted to checking facts and investigative journalism. Stories tend to be more about events as they unfold and less about an analysis of these events.

Because each audience is smaller, and there is more pressure to keep and build readership, more blogs are taking license with the news and injecting their own opinions and emotions. The new news now has different recognizable brands. Some of it is highly-opinionated, some of it is highly-partisan, and some of it is distributed by individuals more concerned with their own celebrity than the integrity of their message.

In the end, it is up to the consumer of the news, you, the reader to avail yourself to as broad a base of information as you can. You have to be your own journalist.

Rhetorical Analysis: The New News

The purpose of this article is to illustrate to a blog-reading audience that there are benefits and dangers to relying on new sources of news. I assumed the audience was made up of people who get a portion of their news from online blogs. I stated the problem and its context in the first few sentences and quickly outlined how the article would illuminate the problem through different lenses.

I used the example of the small political campaign to show how organizations with little capital can build and maintain an audience and engage them to act on behalf of the organization. I also demonstrated that even though these vehicles come at a low cost, they must be employed with a great deal of focus and skill in order to be effective. I tried to illustrate an execution exemplar with an analysis of how Naheed Nanshi’s campaign employed emerging media to win the recent Mayoral election in Calgary.

Naheed Nanshi’s campaign example shows that, for people at the bottom of the hierarchy in public debate, emerging media, when skillfully employed, can gain your organization an audience and can move them to form or change their opinion and to act on their inclinations.

When looking at the impact of emerging media at a large scale, I wanted to show that there are benefits and dangers to the new model. Some of the benefits make the conversation more thorough and diffuse the power of the government to mold public opinion. Some of the dangers work to cloud and undermine the facts because the individuals reporting the news now have pressure to offer more momentary opinion and less long-view analysis.

I assumed my audience would initially feel safe with the choices they make in selecting emerging media news sources. Some of my opening phrases to paragraphs are meant to directly challenge that feeling of safety.

I also assumed that everyone reading my article has participated in a public conversation, through new media, without thought to the system itself. The human race has a history of embracing the novelty of new path, long before it embraces the added responsibility of it. This article is meant to use the context of the novelty of the emergence of new news sources, and illuminate the new responsibility that the reader has.

By the end of the article, the reader has a new consideration. If they obtain your news at no expense, it may not be without cost. In a media landscape laden with so many different accounts of events, polluted by so many opinions, the reader now must be his or her own journalist. And that should come as a surprise to most of the readers of this article.

For an oral presentation, I would begin by posing a question to a member of the audience that was roughly twenty five years old, and in the first few rows: “Who is your favorite journalist?”

I would then ask up to 5 other people in the room the same question. I would then transition into my topic by pointing out the diversity of their answers. Then, if I knew one of their responses to be more of a celebrity, or more of an editorial reporter, I could select that respondent and challenge them with a question: “Do you really feel that Glenn Beck is a journalist?”

I would then conclude my opening interaction with the audience by positing, “It used to be the responsibility of the journalist to discover support material, present both sides of a story and analyze its bearing on our lives. Now that responsibility is yours.”

The purpose of this is to engage the audience in a sort of proof and then posit a statement that inverts the way they may see the typical relationship between themselves and the news sources they trust.

When presenting my opening context, I would show or quote contrasting examples of two famous live broadcasts to demonstrate how the tone of news has changed over the years. After I have engaged them, allowed them to participate, inverted their commonly-held viewpoint, and provided two credible examples to illuminate my context, I then present the ideas in the blog article, with only slight modifications to tone and tense.