“Sounds a lot of fun” — My reflection post on our class “Inside the News Media”
The semester is finally coming to an end and the students of the seminar „Inside the News Media“ will write their last blog post of the semester. So will I…
What did I learn in the past three months? I learned that newspapers in order to keep up with the latest articles rely heavily on press statements from corporations and often do not really check the information or alter phrases. They sometimes simply copy and paste. I also learned about the backup articles every greater news outlet in the world has in their archives just waiting for a special, inevitable event to happen: like the death of a certain president, or the resigning of a prime-minister. Just-in-case so to speak, simply to be the first to upload it onto your website, minutes or even seconds after the event took place. Of course there were dozens of examples where newspapers failed in doing so: when they thought former Vice-president Dick Cheney died and uploaded a bunch of articles about his life, and got mixed up with an article called „ UK’s favorite Grandmother“.
The seminar gave me deep insights into the news media business and forced me to overthink certain positions towards issues of that topic. Most of the problems or topics weren’t really new to me, as my second subject is politics. I was always consuming only news websites, stopped using Facebook years ago because of the issues we also discussed in class. But as a matter of fact, the seminar made me think even further about the topics. For instance, I knew how Facebook makes its money, but never dug deeper like: how does this algorithm work and how exactly do they make money?
The seminar was quite exciting, due to the topic, but more because of Geoffrey. He really knows how to present the topics and how to start a controversy discussion in class. I really noticed that he enjoys the topic and that was a good ground for our learning environment to. I know what you guys are thinking. But I’m serious. I already have my aktive Teilnahme after sending this blog post, so why should I care?
I have an example: some time ago I met a friend for coffee and I was telling him about the videos Geoffrey showed us that week. I know my friend would laugh as shit. And yes he did. Afterwards we talked about the future of newspapers and the criticism Geoffrey mentioned and some rough ideas how to fix that problem. And so a conversion and even a discussion elaborated between me and my friend. To round things up I told him about Shattered Glass we were about to watch in class and showed him a trailer and the interview with the real journalist behind the character. And as friends we laughed about it because it was so unreal. This wasn’t the only time I showed him things we did in class. So my friend laughs and looks at me: „This seminar you are attending, sounds a lot of fun!“. It was the first time someone ever said that to me and it was most certainly the first time I answered: „Yes“ to such a question.
That is why I want to thank you Geoffrey for this semester. It was so much fun and at the same time informative and critical. I really hope you’ll do something that fulfills you. I wouldn’t mind If you continued to teach something, because you’re really good at it!
P.S.: This is my farewell gift for you. I laughed a thousand times during the semester, so I thought I could show you a funny video as well. Here is Portugals Trump message (if you haven’t seen it yet, and yeah my name is portuguese):
