New York and Washington D.C.: Sights and sounds

Students met with media professionals in two cities over the course of two week in New York and Washington D.C. Check out an audio slideshow of the media-related experience from the trip below.

Public Broadcasting Service: Paula Kerger

Public Broadcasting Service chief executive officer Paula Kerger said the hope of nonprofit organizations is to make the world a slightly better place everyday. With educational content spanning multiple platforms, PBS is attempting to change the way their diverse audience can access content.

“For every media organization, there are layers of challenges,” Kerger said. For PBS, these challenges include moving video programming online for Web streaming, creating social networking and discussion tools on the Internet’s top broadcaster site, PBS.org. PBS tries to seek out viewers for their site through online tags and search optimization tools.

Kerger said the corporation has historically been a pioneer, being the first to utilize closed captioning and a national satellite. Today, the corporation does multicasting, and distributes much of their content in high definition. In addition, PBS allows some users to publish their own content with the corporation, Kerger said.

PBS also looks for their programming to help parents in their day-to-day lives with their children. Short video segments for mobile phone distribution can help mothers keep children busy in the grocery store, and television programming for children who use English as a second language can help improve literary skills.

Content is also geared for a more senior chunk of PBS viewership as well. PBS uses mediums like Xbox and Hulu to distribute programming, Kerger said. All you have to do is look down to see people getting media from iPhones and laptops, she said, to know that mobile media will probably be the next frontier.

Finding success, Kerger said, involves tinkering with the traditional formula of media until something that works sticks. The digital world has evolved as an on demand offering and as needing user generated content, she said.

“You have to experiment or otherwise you’ll never move forward,” Kerger said.

-Derek Casanovas and Jasmine Linabary

Want to hear more from Kerger? Check out the video below:

Old vs. new media: the fight over the share of a shrinking pie

By Yong Kim

Several years ago, photos were considered fact. The saying used to go "the proof is in the picture." It was the smoking gun. But now in the digital age, photo manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop allows people to change the original image to look like just about anything.

In an age of new media and digitization, the lines of reality, fiction and professionalism have been blurred.

What gives a professional journalist writing for the daily paper a leg-up against the citizen journalist blogging on his or her computer at home?

It's primary information versus secondary information, Fleming Meeks, editor of Barron's Magazine, said.

Reporters get information directly from the source, whether that is from a person or document. Bloggers on the other hand will most of the time make a post with referred information obtained by an article or reporter who gathered the data.

The second- or third-tier reporting is the fallacy for bloggers, Meeks said.

The current dilemma of news is the competition between traditional journalists and average citizens reaching audiences with the same news information.

The piece of pie news organizations has been fighting for has shrunk, and continues to shrink with competition from new media. News companies like the Christian Science Monitor and U.S. World News & Report has moved exclusively online due to the ailing newspaper industry.

Many traditional news organizations have adapted to this new era of digitization. Most newspapers and T.V. broadcasters have online counterparts full of exclusive and original content visitors can find separate from what is already offered.

Still, however, many news companies are still struggling to keep afloat the tidal wave of new media that has, in many ways, leveled the playing field and reality of where and how information is accessed.

“[The biggest current challenge in media law is] trying to figure out what the hell to with the digital environment,” said Michael Botein, a New York Law School’s professor of law specializing in media.

The problem with citizen journalists or bloggers is that they don’t adhere to the same journalistic standards reporters do, he said.

Sure, new media like blogs are more personal, interactive and personal compared to, say, an article from the NY Times. But that same blog probably isn’t as credible or reliable as the story reported in the NY Times. But traditional journalism like the newspaper still has some serious disadvantages.

A paper that runs on a weekly, biweekly and even daily basis would hardly be able to compete with an online news blog that runs on a 24-hour news cycle.

Why wait a day or week for you to read the news when you can get it this very minute online?

So when the pros and cons of each side are cancelled out, who will turn out victorious? Or will either of them be left standing when the smoke clears? Will it be some kind of hybrid?

John DeNatale, director of local programming for Thirteen/WNET, one of the largest PBS programs, said the next fight would be on the fight of authenticity.

But so far, the media experts and those working in it we have met does not seem to have a definitive answer as of yet.