MURL Building Blocks Blog: GoogleTube

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

GoogleTube

It has been some time since I last posted. There has been this rush of mouth-dropping crazy news from the Amish Shooting in Lancaster County…and the Denver School incident… to the Foley scandal…to the nuclear test in North Korea…and the announcement the other day about Google’s acquisition of YouTube. All of it seems to have a way of keeping you off-balance. Everything you hold to be ‘normal’ is suddenly thrown off-center. You would think the safest place in the world – a one-room school house in Amish country – would be safe. Apparently not. I know it doesn’t have the same emotional gut feeling as the shootings, but the whole Google acquisition of YouTube makes me wonder about the future. I suppose it’s good for the ‘new media’ world, but it does make me wonder about those left behind…people in the neighborhoods and the inner-city. Google isn’t exactly top-of-mind there…as least, I don’t think so, not when you have trouble just getting city services, and staying safe.
Will we wind-up with a whole generation, whole sections of our cities left behind? Or, should we see it the other way with the GoogleTubes of the future as the great equalizer, where everyone can post, everyone can have a video...the new Internet town square?

1 Comments:

At 11:24 AM, C. Compton said...: I find this to be frighting. As always, not only will people in less fortunate commnuities go without the Web, but now the Web will make it easier to continue to ignore those without a means to an online voice. Therein lies the beauty of creating a print format of what we do at MURL. We can get our info out a lot more efficiently that way than online and I, personally, cannot wait for that moment!

Welcome to the MURLbuildingblocks blog and the launch of our "Building Blocks" initiative.
The Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab (MURL) is the cornerstone of Temple University's Journalism Department and its mission to better tell stories in the under-covered and under-served neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

Central to the MURL mission is exploring ways to better tell stories in our under-served and under-covered urban neighborhoods. And, in the process, give some voice to those working to make their neighborhoods a more livable place. But to do it – “give voice to voiceless” - assumes the neighborhoods have a certain ease of access to technology and the means to pull-in multimedia content, “news.” We don’t make that assumption. Gut instinct and observation tells us something different. People are focused on survival; generated a decent income; and maintaining some balance in their world and with neighbors along the block.

This year in our MURL capstone class, and in partnership with WHYY-TV, we'll experiment with some relatively new technology - "datacasting" - to deliver hyper-local news content back into targeted Philadelphia neighborhoods. Our efforts are supported by a "New Voices" grant from the J-Lab at the University of Maryland. The J-lab projects are supported with grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Over the next year, we'll select two neighborhood locations along Philadelphia’s “golden block.” In partnership with WHYY-TV and using the station’s “datacasting” system, MURL students will send out a hyper-local neighborhood newscast/program/stories targeted to that community. The “datacasting” technology will enable us to send the content directly over the air to rooftop receiving antennaes and down to desktop computer(s) located at the community centers. The program built by Temple University Journalism students - MURL students – will be a mix of multimedia stories and “service news” produced by students and neighborhood “news” stories as seen through the eyes of the residents themselves. Neighborhood residents will use a combination of disposable digital still and video cameras as well as low-end digital audio recorders to tell the multimedia stories of their neighborhood and their “block.” All of this will contribute to building a 360 degree media view of the neighborhood

This MURL brand of news provides a form of hyper-local coverage missing from our urban communities. In an environment of where Journalists are mistrusted and a media that sees the dark side of their neighborhood, a level of transparency is created by this project - we hope.

There it is. This is our start and a place to begin building blocks in the neighborhoods.