I have a mind that... wanders a lot. My step-dad likes to call this my propensity for distraction, and we have lots of serious phone conversations about it while I’m Wikimeandering from The Beach (Film) to the Boston Brahmin.
We live in a very fast-paced and colorful world where distraction is a replenishing pool of Twitter feeds, snapstories, YouTube vids, Instagram likes, Tinder matches, and Buzzfeed posts. Whenever you're feeling unproductive, you can literally make a shoo-ing gesture onto your mousepad, and your Word document will flee the screen, no questions asked.
It’s clear to see how our generation can get scorned for its bad habits, but too often we don’t receive praise for how truly incredible we are. People are creating things today at a rate that massively surpasses any other point in history. Photo-editing tools that were reserved for professional photographers only ten years ago are now in the arsenal of any of the 1.75 billion people yielding a smartphone. Students aren’t just writing for school assignments—they’re also tweeting, texting, emailing, commenting, and messaging.
But this wave of technology has hit us from a hose on full blast, and the wealth of information accessible to us can be overwhelming and even discouraging.
We live in such an interconnected and informational world, but it’s unclear where you should begin to start processing it all. This is especially true when it comes to journalism.
News headlines—which used to be confined to your local newspaper or TV station—are now absolutely everywhere, and it’s easy to tune out the news of a bombing that happened 3,000 miles away in a city with a name you can’t pronounce.
Following the news has become a chore, and it’s easy to click away from that New York Times article in lieu of something just posted to BuzzFeed.
This is because so much of news depends on context. Articles today are presented with the most current information on top, while explanations of important names, historical context, what happened yesterday, and what happened a year ago is covered very briefly, if at all. This form of journalism is a boon to our attention-deficit generation--the kids who want to change the world, but preferably without reading too many words.
And what is the point of reading about a bombing that happened 3,000 miles away from you if you don’t have a basic understanding of why it happened? It’s very hard to pay attention to something you don’t understand.
As a writer and reader of news, I love to get to the root of things and really examine a topic from the ground up. My goal as a journalist is to step back and address current news stories as simply and comprehensively as possible.
I decided to double major in journalism and computer science so I can harness the accessibility and aesthetics of current web technology and apply it to the inaccessibility of dense news topics. This blog is an outlet for me to practice ideas that have been floating around in my head, and do journalism the way I think it should be done.
Next week, I'm going to begin to identify important news topics and slowly build a foundation of knowledge using interactive displays and unconventional reporting styles. The goal is that when you are skimming the news headlines or listening to NPR in the car, you will have a little more understanding of the issue at hand.
I hope you enjoy the content I produce in the weeks to come—I’m very happy you stopped by. I would be absolutely thrilled if you wrote in the comments of this post—you can do so anonymously if you want (no need to register for a commenting profile). Let me know if you have any ideas for upcoming posts, if you got bored with this one, or anything else you might want to add. Thanks!!!
💋 💋,
Elif
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