What is News??

There are many different means of acquiring the news whether it is in the newspaper, watching it on television, or now one of the most popular, the internet. The news paper being around for the longest time still is slowly growing in amount of readers but it is not getting the same numbers as it did before. In the book Media Literacy by W. James Potter it states, "Only about 45% of American Adults read newspapers regularly" (Potter 125). The majority of the people that read the paper are senior citizens. Many people now get their news from the internet.

The internet is vastly growing with different web sites to get todays and yesterdays news. Now there are local community papers that are on the internet. When I used the site CyberJournalist, I found that there are many links that took me to citizen journalism sites. The specific site that I chose was http://northfield.org/. It is used so that the citizens of Northfield can talk about what is going on within their community.

The great thing about this site is that there are not the same constraints that are discussed in Media Literacy by Potter on page 103. These include deadlines, resource limitations and geographical focus. There are no deadlines that need to be made when you have a site like this. People can post whenever and whatever they want that deals with what is going on in their community or what is going to happen. The items that are posted tend to be things that are going to happen. It seems to focus mostly on promoting what events are taking place or will be taking place.

By using these citizen sites it also keeps from having your resources limited. Anyone in Northfield is able to post on it. This allows people in the communities to write what ever they want without having the restrictions such as the news stations or the editors of the papers.

It does however have a geographical focus for the area of Northfield. This site was made for the community of Northfield and talks about things that occur there. It does not focus on what is happening around the world like many other sites do.

This being said, I have learned that there are many different means of gaining the news. When I learned about this different way for people to communicate with each other I found it very interesting. People being able to get their opinions and events out in the news without someone turning them down could be a new beginning to the media.