My brother, who teaches Media Literacy at a high school in Chicago, always has his finger on the pulse of the new media technology scene. Yesterday he showed me and my Dad Current TV, which is kind of like a TV on the internet made up of better-produced YouTube-style programs. Looking at it briefly, it looks like the future of TV news. Each story is presented on the front page and you click on it and watch a 3-18 minute video on it.
The reason Steve's interested in it is so that he can give his students the assignment to make a news story for themselves and submit it to Current. It's awesome. They post a bunch of topics that they want covered (see them here) and you can choose which one you want to shoot and submit it. They also pay you. I think this is perfect for my friend Dan, who's in film school in LA, but he always views my ideas with skepticism.
This type of news journalism is the new frontier, I think. Some Journalism Grad Students gave a presentation on this in my Social Change and Trends class. They talked about a thing Minnesota Public Radio (NPR) is doing called Public Insight Journalism. Instead of interviewing "experts in their field" for articles, Minnesota Public Radio interviews actual normal people who deal with the issues on a daily basis. It's all very postmodern.
Oh, and did I mention that Current TV is the brainchild of Al Gore and Google? Figures. Here's the wikipedia article on it.
