Thursday, March 11, 2010

Final Video

COMM 422 - Final Broadcast from Harry Locke IV on Vimeo.

COMM 422 - Final Broadcast

The Ohio State University

Winter Quarter

Final Video - Script

Final COMM 422 – Broadcast Script

[INTRO/Gabe Turk]
Gabe Turk Clip

[Narration I]
Like many college students, Gabe Turk, a graduating communication major at The Ohio State University, has an active account on social networking site Facebook.com.

For users like Turk, Facebook and other social networking sites were once the perfect haven for keeping in touch with friends, and storing pictures of memorable party nights. However, rapid expansion of social networking sites into the professional job market has created a sobering reality.

With employers and grad school admission committees now screening the profiles of potential candidates, a rising number of college undergraduates are finding their careers damaged before they even don the cap and gown.

[April Calkovsky]
April Calkovsky Clip

[Narration 2]
April CAL-KOFF-SKI, internship specialist in the Arts and Sciences Program at The Ohio State University, works closely with helping students find internships in their field of study. For Calkovsky, informing students about maintaining their online reputation has become a high priority.

[April Calkovsky]
April Calkovsky Clip

[Narration 3]
For some potential job candidates, that awareness has come to late.

A recent survey released by Microsoft, revealed that 70 percent of surveyed Human Resource recruiters from around the world have admitted to rejecting an applicant solely on their online behavior.

Jerry Thomas, a faculty member in the Department of Human and Community Resource Development, works with organizations to integrate technology and social networking media into their workflow. Thomas feels younger users may be leaving themselves vulnerable to candidate rejection, by recklessly publicizing negative images.


[Jerry Thomas]
Jerry Thomas Clip

[Narration 4]

For this reason, many internship and job recruiters advise young professionals to get it right the first time. By following guidelines deemed as social networking etiquette

Monitor inappropriate profile pictures

Refrain from unprofessional status or tweet updates

Untag yourself from photos that may be deemed controversial by employers

Caution in posting opinion pieces in notes, tweets, and other published material that can be considered controversial

Do not reveal too many personal flaws. Such as party behavior, and even poor grammar usage on your profile page that can come across as a weak communicator.

[Narration 5]

As a result of the increase in employers and recruiters scanning online profiles of potential candidates, many young professionals have turned to abandoning social networking media sites in fear of negative impacts. However, avoiding social networking as a whole could put employee-hopefuls at a disadvantage as well.

[Jerry Thomas]
Jerry Thomas Clip II

[Narration 6]

And as spring graduation looms on the horizon, many students hoping to make the transition from student to professional a smooth one are evaluating how online reputation will affect their job placement.

[Alice Kocab and Rachel Starr]
Alice Kocab and Rachel Starr Clip

Power poking, making bank on Facebook

Social networking media has officially matured into world market functionality, and Facebook stands as the poster child of the new industry marketing tools.

On February 4 of this year, the social networking behemoth cruised past the 400 million user mark, a number it took only five months to achieve after hitting the 300 million milestone in 2009. According to the index detailing valuations released by SharesPost, a company that allows shareholders in private companies to sell stock to prospective buyers, Facebook is valued at $11.5 billion.

Understandably, businesses around the world have begun to take notice of the success Facebook has enjoyed as a company, and are assessing how the sites easily accessible networking tools can benefit their own business.

One of the tools that are offered to professionals seeking to make a profile on Facebook, is that of a business account.

“Its readily available and free,” said Sarah Wartman, a PR major at Purdue University who manages the business account of a company at one of her internships. “As soon as you make the account, your company has instant access to a user base of over 400 million users. It’s a marketing dream.”

Business accounts are geared specifically towards those who wish to promote the profiles and ad campaigns of their respective business. They lack many of the features offered in personal profiles, and are exclusively geared towards the promotion of the business’ services.
Facebook’s extensive ad builder allows businesses to find their targeted demographic, by filtering through sorting criteria such as age an interests.

“It is definitely changing how companies attribute revenues towards marketing experiences,” said Wartman. “The prices are ridiculously low for the ads, and a huge cost saver for smaller companies who lost tons of dollars on hiring major advertising groups.”

Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, 25, while still an undergraduate at Harvard University.

Zuckerberg, who serves as the Facebook's CEO, is currently the youngest self-made billionaire. With an estimated net worth of $2 billion.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Ethics Critique

Andy Warhol,the late grandfather of pop art, once claimed that in the future everyone would have their own, "15 minutes of fame." In today's technology fueled society, it seems this is becoming true whether individuals pursue the fame or not.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace now expose our everyday trials and tribulations to as many "friends" or "followers" that we can amass through real world friends, family, and occasionally fans. While social networking sites were always designed with keeping colleagues in touch, as Podger's article so blatantly shows, social networking has evolved into a phenomenon much larger than keeping old school chums in touch. Social networking sites now have the power to shape an individual's vocational career, just as quick as it can maim one. Creating a line of control between the accepted and the unaccepted on social networking sites is a legitimate concern for both aspiring and established professionals. Especially for those within the business of delivering un-biased news.

Steve Buttry, director of community engagement at Allbritton Communications, outlines some good bullet points in his blog that he suggests journalists consider when using social networking sites:

-Consider everything public
-Consider everything signed
-Consider everything to be bogus
-Consider whether opinions are appropriate.

While Buttry's blog continues to talk about the specific pros and cons of various networking sites, I find these core values to be the meatiest part of the discussion. If we take in to fact that everything we publish is public, it harkens back to the "15 minutes of fame" quotation, in that we are publishing our ideologies or emotions to millions of people to access. Whether we are commenting as journalists or personal users, hitting publish is the equivalent to signing a release agreement, and opens the floodgates to be evaluated by the public. For some, this has been a highly profitable system, and for others it has lead to being a costly mistake.

Buttry, like many other analysts of social networking and journalistic reporting, does not deny that sites like Facebook and Twitter are fantastic sources for finding stories. But there is also the notion that a great deal of deception goes on in the Internet, and a great deal of caution from news hunters that must be deployed to deliver the truth. Of course, this is easier said than done. The foundation of the Internet and social networking sites, is essentially a maelstrom of facts and lies looking to take advantage of the uninitiated, or taken advantage of by the savvy. Reporting today calls for journalists to be more savvy now, than perhaps ever before.

Clearly the guidelines between what is accepted, and what is unacceptable, begins with the bond between writer and editor. Not every editor is equal in how they value the legitimacy of social networking sites in journalistic reporting. While they should all consider the ideal, to stay competitive with other news outlets, how they evaluate the personal networking of their writers and their professional persona should be open to the editor's discretion.

If I was placed in the shoes of a published paper, the boundaries I established would correlate with the guidelines discussed in Buttry's blog. While writers should monitor their comments to make sure that what they are posting is appropriate, they should also consider making accounts that establish a clear differentiation between their public and private lives. While this in no way, shape, or form would establish a fool-proof safeguard between ethical discrepancies of my writers and their content. It would acknowledge the dual identity social networking sites play in our constantly connected society. It is simply not ethical to force writers to refrain from having some sort of personal identity after they clock out the office, but we can expect them to keep there words from tainting the professional work they release to the public.

As workers in a public environment, we take on the responsibility of knowing we are open targets to the public. The expansion of social networking sites has opened that vulnerability across the board for other industries as well. While writers should be granted the ability to have personal enjoyment through these sites, they must also be made aware that they face consequences if they abuse them. If caught acting in a truly ludicrous manner, they should expect punishment no different than that if they had acted in such a manner in a real-world newsroom.

It is important for editors to stress to their writers when and when not, something can be made available for discussion via networking sites. Further expansion of news gathering technologies and dispersion of news updates, should cause for a stronger bond between writer and editor, rather than an increase in penalty deliveries from editors onto writers for acting inappropriately via Internet applications.