Journal #3
In the first chapter of Writing and Reporting news, one thing that I found interesting was the topic of convergence and what branched off of that. Convergence was brought up pretty early in the chapter and readers were told to look at is a marriage or partnership in which each type of media has a distinct identity but instead of competing with each other they work together. I thought this was interesting because on almost all forms of media we see today we can find out a bunch of different information all in one place, and the book itself said that the days of writing on a single topic have ended. This makes convergence important because without the ability to have several media organizations working together, the media we see would probably look a lot more competitive and also be more inefficient for readers. Another thing in this chapter that I found interesting was the topic of hard and soft news. This stood out to me because this is something that was lightly brought up in a discussion last class and it was also something I haven’t really heard of before. Hard news includes stories of timely nature about conflicts that are happening whereas soft news are stories that are designed to entertain and focus more on people, places or issues. I think that it is important to know the difference between these types of news because it can help us dissect what we are reading and writing about it.
