Media Journalist by Day, Singer/Songwriter by Night

On the 28th my New Media class at DSU had a wonderful guest speaker by the name of Adam Hammer. He started out as a photo journalist in college but found a career in media. He writes for the St. Cloud University Outlook magazine and his official title is Director of Media Relations. During his time here he talked about his life and how that took him to changing career paths. A lot of it was due to job demand and his previous experience in writing for newspapers as well as the loss of his job when his newspaper company at the time was cutting down on writers, and now having an uneven ratio of editors:writers. He had found a job with St. Cloud University, which had a very similar problem and he created a lot of changes to the program to widen up the audience and keep everything fresh and up to date.
In his spare time he performs in small towns as a singer/songwriter and that information can be found on his website.

Convergence, Collective intelligence, and participation

Today I decided to venture into the world of 'reality tv', not my favorite genre in the world - but it's big now, so why not try to figure out why. The sites I took a peak at were Survivor's and American Idol, reality tv that was huge before reality tv was.

From a first glance, I was really impressed with the appearance of American Idol's website. It's super easy to navigate, but my favorite detail was when you scroll down all of the features fall into the center of the page. It creates some major eye appeal.
Then as you get further into the website a whole American Idol world can be seen. It has pages for everything - from news to host and judge biographies and behind the scenes, even how to get tickets to attend one of the shows.
A lot of it has options for users to have a voice in the show, with a link to vote and even questions for live Q+A sessions with the contestants. Everything about the site is to enable viewers to basically be apart of the show - and more than just a viewer.

Now, a look at the Survivor's website - it doesn't have nearly all of the bells and whistles that American Idol has. It's fairly straight forward with links to help you catch up on episodes you might have missed, a merch shop, and biography and summary links. It isn't nearly as interactive in comparison to Idol.

And despite not having watched either show, I was more obligated to want to linger onto the American Idol webpage just because it was more interactive and I was allowed to input some of my own thoughts about the show that ventured off from more than just the usual social media websites.
It kind of shows the type of world we have now, new media has given us the ability to have a voice in these bigger media outlets and we will take those opportunities as often as we can, we have a voice and we want to use it! We want to see our favorite contestants strive, and we want to be part of the key to help them get there.