Alizah Salario

Over the past two months, my Internet savvy has increased tenfold. It has less to do with a specific skills set and more to do with a particular approach to the digital quagmire. I’ve planted my stake in the cloud.  I’m a producer of the Internet, and have as much influence on it as it has on me. (Amazing how a horizontal mindshift can take you up a few notches vertically).

Yet I don’t take to technology naturally. I’m comfortably learned, but still out of my element. I prefer routines because they are habit, not because they are inherently better.  I suppose that’s how many people feel about reading the newspaper.

I’m on social networks, but I can’t say I’ve fully integrated into them. It feels a bit like selling out. I  didn’t even know what a mashup was until today. I look at my dinky little blog and berate myself for failing to brand my image or use the Internet to my professional advantage.  The links on my website are broken.  I recognize that it lacks all the features of Web 2.0 – no fancy interface or graphics hardly any visuals for that matter. My mind is swarming with questions about how to improve, but one buzzes the loudest: What’s the point?

I’d be foolish to write off technology and the vast cloud of the Internet. Clearly, I use both to my advantage and I find the trajectory of ever changing technology interesting – to an extent.

There’s a limit to my fascination with how we can effect elections with tweets or blogging software’s ability to increase site traffic.  I’ve learned to think digitally, but my heart still belongs to analog. What really grabs me is mystery and discovery. I find that in how we communicate face to face or via the written workd- something with characters and a clear beginning, middle and end – that can do that which other things cannot.

I want to learn, improve and be the best that I can, but I can’t forget my ultimate goal. When comes down to it, all I really want to do is tell a damn good story.

Yes, I know its Sunday, but I simply couldn’t wait to share info on some exciting new sites. Remember there’s more out there than Facebook and Twitter.

1) The Atlantic’s new opinions aggregate, The Atlantic Wire, launches this week. The site chooses 50 of the most influential thinkers and opinions writers who shape our thinking and foster public debate. Join the conversation.

2) A new way to search: Google fast flip allows users to search multiple magazine sites for a specific topic. Pages virtually flip from one article to the next. A quicker, more efficient way to scan a variety of sources.Great for indulging my celebrity obsessions and Internet ADHD.

3) I’m also loving the NY Time’s new  Visual Journalism blog. Incredible photographs and video from some top notch journalists.  Taking visual journalism to the next level.

Bonus: My new television obsession,  Glee.  Its sooo New Trier Forensics team circa the late 90’s. In the pilot there’s an acapella version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing and a main character who posts a weekly MySpace video of her musical theater performances. What’s not to love?

I had the pleasure of reading Gawker’s play-by-play of Harvey Levin’s visit to the J-school.

Comments after the article included one about Columbia “stooping low” in inviting Levin, and a bit about  “paparazzi=journalists? Ah the dumbing down of America strikes again.”

I listened intently to Harvey. I listened because he has a business model that works, and that’s no easy feat whether the content is about The Hills or Capitol Hill.  We spend so much time debating what journalism should be that we fail to notice what it is.

It is not the news that needs to change but the paradigm in which we examine it.  Are we the first generation to experience a radical shift in the way information is disseminated? Highbrow and lowbrow entertainment are no longer separated by a vast chasm of social and class differences. Media – our access to it and the expediency with which it travels – fills the void.

The issue is much larger than entertainment news watering down hard news or bloggers diminishing the credibility of reporters – it is the consumers becoming the producers. It is user generated content, citizen journalists, sending eyewitness pictures taken with a cell phone camera over twitter and getting picked up by AP, and bloggers who have influence not because they are going to win Pulitzers but because they are widely read. It is accessibility and exposure. It is reality television making a celebrity out of the average Joe. It is Ashton Kutcher twittering sans an agent or publicists’ approval that makes the average Joe accessible to a celebrity.

Why don’t we just accept that these hybrid forms of distilling entertainment and information are not to be written off nor defined as authentic journalism just yet? They need to come in to their own, but until then why not explore them? Why don’t we stop caring what were are or we aren’t and invite the head of the top celebrity news site to a distinguished journalism school simply because we need to listen?

Journalists do not exist in a vacuum.  What good would it to do staunchly defend entrenched ways of thinking about news and newspapers simply because that’s the way things have always been? That’s an awfully conservative notion, and that’s something that journalism, as an institution, has never been.

We like boxed wine and fancy champagne. We can shop at Target and Bloomingdales. These ideas are not revolutionary. Why should they been seen as transgressive when applied to journalism?  A site like Gawker (see blogroll) could only exist in a fractured, hybridized, communal media world anyway. And in my opinion, that’s a good thing.

To compartmentalize – and therefore to close oneself off -  in a medium (the internet) and an industry (the media) that is fluid and open by its very nature is to contradict precisely what makes it successful. It is career suicide.

This week in words and pictures:

1. The entire Columbia J-school class of 2010 standing on the steps of the Journalism school. Perhaps you can catch my frizzy hair somewhere in there.   J-school photo
2. After three intense weeks of photo and audio training, I produced my first audio slideshow. Final cut pro and SLR cameras are now on my know how to list. It’s not quite NPR or NYT material, but for a girl who doesn’t deal with programs beyond Microsoft word I’d say its not too shabby. My audio slideshow
3. “Who are you to play God?” Disturbing events at a New Orleans hospital in the wake of Katrina. A great example of long term investigative reporting.  Uncovering Katrina
4. Just for fun! Six-word memoirs. A great site for poets and wordsmiths. I liked the love ones, naturally. “Take me for what I am” and “I’ll know when my love comes” and “There’s a place for us, somewhere…” Okay, I’ll stop.  Smithmag