Gena Asher | Feb. 26, 2009
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| Photo by Riya V. Anandwala |
| University of Michigan visiting professor and 20-year journalist Fara Warner showed her audience her Flip video camera during her talk about multimedia a the IMU. |
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That’s the advice of Fara Warner, a journalist with 20 years’ experience as a reporter who now is a visiting professor at the University of Michigan’s Department of Communication. She spoke to five classes at the School of Journalism Monday and Tuesday as well as addressed the Bloomington Press Club.
Warner, who reported for The Wall Street Journal, among others, said the blogosphere needs trained professionals. While many blogs started out as “rants and raves,” they now are turning to reporters to create fact-checked, transparent news reports.
“We have allowed this vacuum where blogs have entered, with rants and raves and business models that don’t work,” she told Press Club members Monday in the Coronation Room at the IMU. “Where have we been? We need to be in the forefront, influencing this.”
This means adapting to the new tools, something Warner said she has learned to do. Accustomed to reporting with a pen and notebook, in recent years she’s learned to use technology to enable multimedia reporting.
She showed her audience one of her favorite tools, a Flip camera that shoots video, then plugs into a USB port for easy download. Using two laptops, she projected several Web sites and blogs on a screen to demonstrate strong examples of multimedia stories. Some she showed and others she cited in her talk included VoiceofSanDiego.org, DailyBeast.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com and Scoop44.com, a student-operated site.
“As I’m thinking of stories, I’m deciding what piece will be a good podcast, what will be best as text,” she said. “I never thought I’d be doing this, but I jumped in and now I love it.”
Warner acknowledged the loss of journalism jobs and newspapers’ plight, but said she believes blogs are hiring such professionals as the blogs look to become more journalistically respectable.
And traditional journalists can’t afford to ignore what’s happening in blogs and on the Web. For one thing, research shows that most people – of all ages – get news online, she said. Second, technology is a great tool. During the Mumbai attacks last fall, news gatherers relied on Twitter posts for information, just as they did when the United Airlines plane ditched in the Hudson River in January.
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| Photo by Riva V. Anandwala |
| “I never thought I’d be doing this, but I jumped in and now I love it.” Warner told her audience at the Bloomington Press Club meeting Monday. |
Warner said she enjoys working with students at UM, especially those who want to be journalists. For the professionals who make up members of the Bloomington Press Club, she urged a “mindshift,” an open-mindedness toward what multimedia can add, not the perceptions of what it takes away.
“As I tell students, you can’t stay in silos of print or broadcast,” she cautioned. “I realize I bring 20-plus years of being a journalist to this, but I am a better journalist for having learned these tools.”
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