Are we all just opinion mongers?

Early on in historical classes we learn that history is defined as Fact and Interpretation. Journalism is not so different. While reporters and media outlets contend that they are unbiased and deliver the undiluted truth, all reporters tell stories from a particular slant, based on their proximity to the story, timeliness or personal backgrounds.

Since September 11, Hurricane Katrina and the War Iraq the public is less trustful of the media than ever. A lot of Journalism tends to back off from drawing conclusion for fear of backlash from readers, listeners or critics. (NPR, 2006)

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history,” said William Graham, Washington Post publisher - perhaps defines best the complex and yet the fascinating relationship between history and journalism.

While both complement each other amid the constant “battle of importance” between events and processes and individuals and societies, modern day journalism and history - purely in terms of discourse - are also starkly different. (CNN-IBN, 2007)

This brings me to a part one of our study: Interpretation. There is always more than two sides to each story, therefore finding balance among all points of view is almost impossible.

In my introduction to Journalism class i would like my students to examine social networks to survey the varying points of view on just one topic. I think to give too many items or stories would inundate the learner.

But I would like students to examine these perceptions before they re-write a particular piece of wire copy. This is an exercise that doesn't have take place in the classroom. I think class time would best used in discussion and reflection.

Now we have to answer this question: Is balance real?

Here are some tools.



Summarizer
The Summarizer is a fun way to explore the things that connect the real-time web and other online publishers: people, places and things. It searches for tweets in the past seven days either by username or topic and returns a ranked list of the people, places and things mentioned that have matches in Evri’s knowledgebase of more than 2 million topics.

Know what you’re talking about. If the “real-time web” is a massive cocktail party conversation, then The Summarizer is the party’s authority. It semantically connects the real-time web and traditional media to one another with their common threads, entities and topics. The Summarizer is currently in Alpha, so please let us know your suggestions by clicking on the Feedback tab to the left.

ListiMonkey
Google Alerts meets Twitter Lists
Instead of being alerted whenever someone tweets something, with Listiti you can be alerted whenever someone belonging to a Twitter List of your choice tweets about something.

Now that we have found our varying points of view. I would encourage students to not only gather their own facts and sources; but using their own backgrounds to draw conclusions. Reminding them of the popularity of talk shows, and news talk radio; students will share their own perspectives.

Here's how we will share.



Deepmemo is a social networking site based around a simple concept: identifying quotes and useful information and then placing them in your profile (the company catchphrase is “social quotation service”). Install the Deepmemo toolbar and then you can add any text you encounter online by highlighting it and pressing the Deepmemo button. Since the user base is predominantly Eastern European right now, you might have difficulty deriving much value from the quotes saved by others, but it’s an interesting twist on the familiar social networking meme. I’d like to see a toolbar-free version to save on screen real estate too. Deepmemo is free, can be accessed with a Facebook, Google or OpenID account.