What is Journalism and Why do we need it?

Journalism is the product of an investigative journalist reporting and publishing on issues and trends to a mass audience. 

As it seems journalism is a pretty simple concept that everyone understands as a part of society and its structure. However, if we delve a little deeper, journalism or the business of storytelling is so embedded in our culture and has been around forever under different names and through different mediums but all to the same end; to satisfy a unifying need to document and communicate.  

The ancient Greeks used myths and theatre, Neanderthal man used cave art, other societies used songs , dances and eventually the written word to tell their stories and document big events. Story telling keeps us connected to our past, aware of our present and mindful of our future. 

Everyone has their own personal narrative and daily news stories which effect small groupings of people but are often of no interest to the mass public. The evolution of journalism is essentially this, story telling but on a regional, national or global scale. 

I think it is safe to say that the art of journalism is in our blood but why do we need it? 

The age old, "Knowledge is Power" has never rung more true, understanding and being made aware of what's happening in our world gives us, the general public, power and a voice on topics far removed from our daily existence. Storytelling also has a community element that unites people in a way that nothing else could, giving them a unified purpose and sense of belonging and what it means to be human.  

Information Curation and Storify

What is News Curation?

Content curation is the business of collecting, organising and displaying information based on a particular topic. This is a journalists bottom line for digital content. The great thing about online news curation is that it can be a combination of images, gifs, twitter posts, video clips, audio clips etc. basically anything that's relevant to the topic and can be found online.

How do we do it? 

There are many sites and ways to go about curating effective topic content, the most popular are:

• Google Search
• Google Blog Search 
• Alltop
• LinkedIn News
• Storify

Storify 

The best out of all of these I have found to be Storify as it combines searches for all mediums of content display. By this I mean that you can enter your buzzword or topic title and choose from YouTube clips, Twitter, Facebook, Google, gifs and even import your own links. 

Storify is a curation display platform used by many journalists as a curation tool and or publishing site. It is also a great way to test out a few story ideas for a bigger project and see what kind of response you get. 

My Experiences Using Storify 

As a journalist only just taking her first steps Storify was a fantastic platform for me to get stuck in and play with a few story ideas. As well as being linked with my Twitter page, it helped me to figure out what worked and what didn't; including how to display information in a more entertaining and visually stimulating way.

Working with Storify I have learned how important  it it to curate appropriate information for your story. I have learned that most of the time a decent thread or story doesn't just pop into your head, you have to go and find it and sites like Storify are a fantastic place to start.

Incredibly exciting stuff, my first post!
As I've mentioned in my about me page, the aim of this blog is to learn as go, while I explore the many journalism platforms and ethical practices 'out there'.

This is my face

:)