How Should the Media Cover Rape Cases?

Posted by Abbey Barrow

While journalists have struggled for years with ethical issues in reporting on rape cases, the recent Steubenville, Ohio case has brought new questions to light regarding how the media approaches rape coverage. Last week’s verdict found two high schoolers guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl in the small Ohio town, but the court decision wasn’t the end of discussion over the case and how is was reported.

Photo via AP

The two boys, 16-year old Trent Mays and 17-year old Ma’lik Richmond were football players in Steubenville, which the BBC calls “a small and economically depressed former steel town that had immense pride in its high school football team, known as the ‘Big Red’.” Many reports on the rape involved a potential cover-up by town authorities to protect the football team. The hacker group Anonymous even staged an effort to publicize information about the story through social media and advocate for the conviction of the two boys.

Social Media and Photo-sharing collide: The Merger of Facebook and Instagram

In recent technology news, it appears that Facebook is slowly taking over the world. The question is, is that a good or bad thing?

By Katie Kalmes 

Earlier this morning, Facebook announced they were buying Instagram, a popular mobile photo-sharing service, for $1 billion. Both Instagram and Facebook posted press releases on their respective sites commenting on the merger.

Instagram CEO, Kevin Systrom, stated on their site that he and co-founder Mike Krieger, “…couldn’t be happier to announce that Instagram has agreed to be acquired by Facebook.”

Viral Media on Social Media

Posted by Sarah Sager

Promoting stories on social media is the norm in journalism. Everyone does it: blogs, online publications and even traditional media outlets. However, when your audience shares your content on their Twitter accounts or as their Facebook statuses, that’s when you know you have engaged them. It shows that someone out there is listening and is reacting to your content (good, bad or otherwise).

NewsWhip, a website that tracks how fast stories spread on social networks, compiled a list of the top 25 viral news sources on Twitter and Facebook, respectively. The overall winners were the BBC, The Huffington Post and the Guardian (Note: sites with paywalls were not included). These three made the list for two main reasons:

Should Bloggers Get Paid?

Posted by Laura Jordan

It’s no secret that journalists aren’t exactly rolling in the dough – but did you know that they make 42 percent less than the national average for all jobs? Add in the long hours researching and writing (not to mention rewriting!), and journalists do a lot of work for very little – especially online.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng

The internet is awesome. You can’t deny that. But it’s also a bit problematic. There are copyright problems, censorship issues, and now payment disputes. Yesterday, a group of bloggers filed a lawsuit against the Huffington Post and AOL (which took over the Post in February). The goal of the lawsuit? Precedent for bloggers to get paid for their work.

Does online media devalue writers?

Posted by: Annika Peick

Aggregator sites have been accused of providing contributors with little to no compensation for their working and undermining the validity of online journalism. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons.

As all journalism majors know, blogging and different forms of media are becoming essential for the realization of success in our respective career fields. This semester I was required to start my own blog from JMC91 and to contribute to this one for JMC 70, exposing me to a whole new realm of journalistic expression. I have also begun to read several blogs on aggregating sites such as the Huffington Post and Tumblr. With AOL’s recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, however, several articles have surfaced discussing whether online media is fair to writers who contribute their pieces free of charge.

According to one article by GOOD Magazine, freelancers who contribute to the Huffington Post have recently become even more critical of the site’s creator, Arianna Huffington, claiming that her actions are devaluing online reporting. Though Huffington is not the only site owner that offers contributors no compensation for content, groups of freelancers are calling her out, and rightly so. In fact, Huffington recently wrote a book in which she claims middle class Americans are an “endangered species” who should be protected from dying out. How is accepting a $315 million buyout from AOL on top of her already astronomical $4 million annual salary and refusing to share any of that huge sum with contributors working to protect the American dream?