Journalist Twitter Analysis

Sarah Jones works as the Deputy Editor of Al Jazeera America. Social media reporting is a big part of her journalism, she tweets multiple times a day and has won the 2014 ShortyAwards’ Best Journalist in Social Media. I could actually find little evidence of her promoting her own work but she tweets and retweets a lot from other news sites. Her constant tweets show that she is dedicated to social media journalism and flows news well. Jim Armstrong is a reporter at WBZ and in contrast, does not post so much, one every two or so days seems to be his pattern, his social media journalism usage is therefor not very high. He has retweets of some WBZ news but a lot of his posts are behind the scenes photos. There is little to no reference to any journalism from other sources besides WBZ. Shawna Thomas who is a senior editor at Meet The Press is another journalist who uses their twitter often, posting multiple times a day. This includes retweets and reference to other peoples journalism while there is also reference to her own stories. I could not find that any of these journalists had a separate personal account from their journalism either.

What Is Hidden: Assignment Proposal

Idea 1

The first idea I have is to do my piece on deaf culture and what it was like to grow up deaf in the 70-80’s when it wasn’t so widely accepted as now. Furthermore my subject now has a cochlear implant so I could look at the transition from being deaf for around 30 years to being thrust into the world of hearing again.

This would fit into the what is hidden theme as, while deafness and cochlear implants are nothing new, they are not something most people think about every day. My mother is deaf and has been most of her life so to me all the things that come along with having a deaf parent are normal but hearing is still a big part of my world. I thought it would be interesting to capture what it has been like to be deaf, how it made things such as school, work and home life different and then the transition into hearing.

To do this I thought I could either start with black and white photography and move into colour or start out of focus and move into focus as we move from talking about deafness to her hearing. I would probably also include some video of her attaching the cochlear implant, maybe showing some of it’s accessories and how they work and a little bit of an interview.

For this the ambient sounds I would use would be every day things, as we move from her deafness to hearing my ambient sounds would correspond with what she talked about, for example the first time hearing the television, or birds chirping, cars moving and that kind of thing.

Idea 2

The second idea I had was to look into women in the music scene, it would be local to Sydney and a female in a band that is small playing local gigs as I wouldn’t have access to anybody big. I thought of looking at females specifically in heavier bands in the rock/metal genre and talking to them about their influences, their journey and how they are treated and how they plan to make it as there aren’t too many females in that genre.

Here I would take photos of them playing, maybe their cd collection or posters of their influences if they have them, if possible I would love to get a photo of a gig that they are playing and any other things that relate them to music and talk about their personality, such as nicknaks around their room, a band shirt collection or whatever I can find. I would also probably include a small amount of video, most likely of them playing and maybe a little bit of an interview.

Here the ambient sounds would be things like guitars, amps, drums and a whole range of instrumental sounds as well as some audience sounds like clapping and cheering. I would laos use a bit of music depending on the style of music that they play, I might even be able to use some of their pre-recorded music if they say yes.