J333 Conclusion

Over the last eleven weeks I worked on a multimedia project about rural broadband.  I aimed to cover various angles of this topic, from Internet dependency, telecommunication monopolies, to how much people use the Internet and for what reasons they use it.  I was unable to report on all of these points in my final product; however, I am happy with the work I produced and the quality of my final product.

If I had more time, or a chance to repeat the last eleven weeks, I would have spent more time trying to get primary sources, finding community members who could speak personally about the topic.  I relied on datasets from various government agencies, this was useful but was not very personal.  I found it difficult to engage with the public because I do not have a real social personality and did not want to seem bothersome to potential sources.  This is something I would really need to overcome if I were to pursue other projects like this.

I enjoy working with design software, such as the Adobe suite.  I have been able to learn many of these tools in previous classes and by exploring them on my own.  I feel I successfully applied these tools to this project.  I was even able to learn a new tool, After Effects. I may have focused too much on producing my footage to represent the data I had researched and not enough on personal interviews.

In conclusion, I feel my final multimedia product was a success.  I may not have been able to cover every angle of the topic that I originally set out to, but I now have a nice starting piece that I can expand on later if I desire.  As my first journalism class, I learned how to be a better story teller.

Beyond 7 Billion

Third place for NPPA’s 2013 Best of Journalism was awarded to the Los Angeles Times for the multimedia package “Beyond 7 Billion”.  This package illustrates the effects that population growth will have on the world in the coming decades.  This piece is comprised of five separate articles, with each covering separate issues and containing their own photo slideshow.  This piece also uses video to help tell stories of how population growth is and will continue the affect the developing world.

The first of the five part series is titled “The Biggest Generation” and introduces the topic of population growth and explains how the worlds population is expected to raise to at least 9.4 billion by 2050.  This piece tells the story of an arranged marriage of a couple in India, and how even with a declining fertility rate in this country population is still expected to grow in coming years.

As with the first part in the series, the proceeding four parts each detail different obstacles that will be brought on by population growth.  These topics include the expected raise of youth uprisings in developing countries, under nutrition brought on by food scarcity, resource exploitation and environmental degradation, and religious and cultural barriers preventing modern birth control methods in some regions.

Each of the five parts to the package include a lengthy and detailed text component written by Kenneth Weiss.  Each individual article details an issues and provides data and historical information about the topic.  All of the articles are prefaced with a real life story about a person or family that has first hand experience facing these challenges.  The structure of these articles are well laid out because the storytelling in the beginning is captivating and adds a person perspective to each of the issues.

Within each article, there are several photographs that accompany the text.  Each article has its own photo slideshow as well.  The photography work is done in photojournalistic format by Rick Loomis who vibrantly captures the various prosecutions of this piece.  Each of Loomis’s photos makes use of layering to capture people within their environments illustrating their living conditions, their struggles and their cultures.  Each photo makes use of the foreground and background to tell the story.

In addition to the written text and photo slideshows, “Beyond 7 Billion” also incorporates video to document stories of the people  in these developing countries.  Video is also used to visualize statistical information with animated graphs and illustrations.

This multimedia piece conveys a lot of information and tells multiple stories by utilizing text, photos and video and does an outstanding job telling the stories of people who will be most affected by population growth in the coming years.

 

Mr. Eli Abramovitz

Eli Abramovitz is an Oregon native.  Born and raised in Portland, Eli resided in the “Rose City” for the majority of his life. Upon his acceptance to the University of Oregon, he decided to move to Eugene in order to obtain his college education.  One of two children, Eli has one younger sister, Kira, who is 18 and is currently attending the University of Idaho.

As a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, Eli has enjoyed the four years he has lived in Eugene.  As a fan of many sports, he particularly likes the University of Oregon because it is sports oriented school.  True to his Oregon native style, Eli enjoys being active and adventurous and spends his time with friends.  His hobbies include camping and playing sports.  He is a member of the soccer, frisbee, volleyball and softball intramural sports teams at the university.

Growing up in Oregon, Eli is no stranger to the rain; however, walking to classes in the rain is one aspect of college in Eugene that he does not particularly care for.  In his leisure time, Eli enjoys traveling.  During Spring Break, Eli and friends escaped the unpredictable Oregon climate by making a several hundred mile road trip along the Pacific Coast, ending up in Southern California.  This summer Eli and his family are planning a trip to Hawaii, which has become a family tradition.

When choosing a college, Eli narrowed his search down to the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and the University of Colorado.  After touring the two Oregon schools and seeing the tuition rates for an out of state student in Colorado, he decided that the University of Oregon was the best fit.   While pursuing his Bachelors in General Social Science and Business he is also working on two minors.  He will graduate this summer with his Bachelor’s and minors in both Journalism and Digital Arts.

Prior to college, Eli was a student athlete who was also an active member on his high school student council.  He was elected Senior Class President twice his senior year allowing him to fill the position the entire year.  As Class President, Eli enjoyed being a leader and a voice of the school.

In both work and school, Eli has demonstrated leadership and responsibility.  He has held many jobs over the years, the list includes but is not limited to: gardening, waiter, warehouse worker, retail associate at Pacsun and teacher’s assistant at his Synagogue.  Upon graduation, he plans to move back to the Portland area, with a desire to ultimately end up in Southern California.  He would enjoy a marketing position with a young company where he and the company can grow together.  When its all said and done, Eli would like to throw in the towel and retire to Hawaii.

 

Eli Abramovitz Senior at University of Oregon

Eli Abramovitz
Senior at University of Oregon

Internet Development & Dependency

Recently my wife and I moved to the outskirts of Springfield Oregon to a little farmhouse in the Camp Creek area. Both children of the 80’s, we grew up during a time when the Internet was not the main way of communicating, doing business or education. The Internet slowly crept into our lives fueling our dependency for this technology, especially over the last decade. Neither my wife or I realized just how much we relied on the Internet in our day day lives until our only option for broadband at our new home was satellite service, which has a 15 Gigabyte per month cap for downloading and uploading data to the web. This restriction made us realize just how dependent we had become, and how a the result of having bandwidth cap altered our lifestyle.

Over the course of this term I plan to delve into the subject of Internet dependency to see other people’s views and opinions on the subject, and to see what other people use the Internet for. I am interested to see if others are as dependent as my wife and I found ourselves to be. I plan to use surveys and interviews to collect this information. Survey services such as SurveyMonkey will allow me to poll other students at the University, which I will then create charts and graphs to display the data.

In addition to Internet usage I will look at how the Internet has come to be what it is today. Without some key technological milestones dating back over 60 years, we would not have what has evolved into an interactive network used in all facets of our lives. The Association for Computing Machinery is home to several publications that will help me illustrate this history. I will create a visual timeline of key milestones showing the development its birth to its current state.

The motivation behind this project started due to the limited options which my wife and I found for Internet service in our semi-rural community. The Federal Communication Commission has information available depicting the spatial distribution for broadband availability across the nation. I plan to incorporate this data by way of maps and graphs into my project to illustrate geographic distribution of service and show “Internet Deserts” across the nation.

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http://www.pewinternet.org/