JFresh Application

Maren Machles

JFreshman Newsroom Application

When listening to and discussing music, one expression is commonly revisited: “you listen to the type of music you grew up with”. We become accustomed to something when we are younger and when reminded of this youth in a song, we are comforted because it is familiar to us. Journalism works in the same way.

Media is evolving from and out of the older generation’s comfort zone. The world is changing so rapidly it is hard for anyone to stay accustomed to just one form of media.   The news has to be evolving at the same rate. This is why younger generations are not watching the news. They are not used to, and cannot be given, a constant. The conversation around this issue is often dominated by a question of what can we report about in order to keep kids interested. However, the issue is not so much the stories that are told, but the way in which we receive them. Personalization, social networking, and mobility are what today’s youth is familiar with. My generation grew up with Wi-Fi, cell phones, and constant accessibility. Previous generations are adjusting news with old lenses. Lenses where 24-hour news was innovative and exciting and where families would come home from a long day and sit down together to watch the nightly news. Television news is no longer a luxury. Actual stories are only given once and when a channel does cover a story for a long period of time it is no longer a story, but a biased analysis. Television news is losing viewers to the internet because people want the stories on their time, and in an unbiased format. The newscast I would produce would not be the normal television broadcast, a distributed newspaper or just an online stream of articles; it would be a mobile combination of all forms of media.

People are not receiving their news in a singular form anymore, they are relying on multiple sources and news outlets, often all at once. The simplest way to describe my newscast is to compare it to a music site such as Pandora. On Pandora you can personalize your station, like or dislike a song and the site will adjust the station to your liking. This is what my newscast would be similar to. We would produce a site with articles, videos, podcasts, radio, recommended documentaries, and analyses. Each subscriber would adjust their own version of the site to their liking. If the audience enjoys listening to their news on the go, then they would subscribe to the podcasts or stream the radio. However, if the audience wanted to sit down and read an article—say before a meeting or a class—they would subscribe to articles. The site would not just send a heap of news and expect you to sort it out yourself; you would choose the types of stories you want to read about and/or hear about, and it would be sent to your site. If a subscriber liked to watch news reports and read articles at the same time, the site would allow that viewer to open multiple sources and view them from the same window. The site would be a mobile app that you could access from phones or computers. It will be the ultimate source of news for my generation.

It is impossible to sit down and think about what stories can be told to today’s youth that will grab their attention and engage them, because there is not just one type of person anymore. Everyone has many styles and forms of expression, making it difficult to appeal to a large audience with any one thing. Everything today needs to be personalized, including the news.