'Fair and Balanced' inauguration coverage

On foxnews.com, I didn't expect to see as much pomp and circumstance as I might have seen on cnn.com. Like many others, I view Fox News as a conservative news station. There is one main story about the new President, a lengthy article by Sharon Kehnemui Liss that details what new President Barack Obama stated in his inauguration speech and his day prior to being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

The front page link to the story is a picture of Obama hugging Senator Ted Kennedy. While the main focus should be Obama, you can't even see his face. There is also an urgent news update included which offers information that Kennedy collapsed at a luncheon held after the swearing in ceremony.



Under the main article picture and link, there are smaller stories discussing the amount of traffic in Washington, D.C. today, Michelle Obama's style, and how ex-President George W. Bush left the White House to return home to Texas.

I don't think this coverage works due to the fact Fox News seems to downplay Obama's inauguration.

If I were editor, I would have a bigger announcement of Obama's inauguration. Whether you are liberal or conservative, this is a moment in history. Even someone who isn't the first black president should get overwhelming news coverage on his inauguration day.

Looking at the Web site for MSNBC, I saw that they were treating this event as much more important than Fox News is. MSNBC's audience is more liberal in nature, but I still believe that they are unbiased on the transfer of power. They still manage to capture Obama's inauguration as something that doesn't happen every day. They have more stories detailing different events that happened during the day and more pictures to add to the viewing experience of their Web site.

The only similarity I could find between the two Web sites that stood out to me was the fact both had Obama's inauguration as the lead story.

After looking at the two Web sites, I prefer MSNBC's coverage. Not only do they give significance to the event but also have smaller stories that lead into the larger picture of the day.

Converging with convergence

Everyone has heard of convergence being used to mark the transition into the future of journalism. What I didn't realize however is that convergence isn't that new of a term.

In 2000, three media outlets in Tampa, Fla. were moved into the same building to work side by side with each other. On page five of "The Art of Editing," Gil Thelen, the former senior vice president and executive editor of the Tribune, confesses that the process of converging operations wasn't easy. I could assume so, considering in every market in the country media outlets are seemingly trained in a "think of yourself first" attitude. Competition in the media has been a staple of the art form since it began.

This leads into chapter two of "The Art of Editing," where the actual need to respond to change is mentioned on page 20.

I can look to the internship I just completed as a prime example of this. At the Tri-County Times, management was tired of the newspaper looking stale and out of date. They gave the Wednesday edition a facelift to make it more colorful and stand out to readers. On the inside, stories were focused more in features rather than reporting on meetings.

With the help of younger writers such as myself and John McKay, there was a push to put video online with certain stories to bring readers to the website. I believe that even though readers were already heading online to comment on the public opinion page, this would help the transition to a fully online newspaper in the future. I hope it never comes to that for any newspaper, but it would be nice to prepare for it rather than be caught off-guard.

An introduction

This blog has originally been created for news editing (JRN 375) at the University of Michigan-Flint, taught by Christofer Machniak. It is part of a class project to understand the fundamentals of writing and editing text, audio and video for the web.

What I hope to get out of this class is the knowledge to spot mistakes in various forms of journalistic media without having to double-check every single word or punctuation. I want it to be intuitive and second nature for me. In the fast-paced world of journalism, it will be a vital skill for me to have. I also hope to learn how to apply AP-style and editing to the Web, which will probably be aided by working on this blog throughout the semester.

This blog itself will talk about Hollywood as a whole and also relate a lot toward the movie business in mid-Michigan. You may ask, "What movie business in mid-Michigan?" The truth is, Michigan is seeing a lot of movie productions coming their way lately, and the number looks to only get higher in the future as more are announced.

Some movies have shot in various locations around Flint in the past, but the 2006 comedy "Semi-Pro" starring Will Ferrell and Woody Harrelson really put the town on the movie map. After this, Michigan began to give heavy discounts to movie productions that came to the state to film, which was enacted in 2008 by Governor Jennifer Granholm. I believe this will not only lead to notoriety, but also will become a big help to our economy.