Week 2: Natalie Henry Bennon, response to Engage/Witness viewings

This post focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of Engage Media and Witness’s websites/content, and how they both support democracy.

The Engage Media website’s strength is that it has a ton of content. However, I think the weakness is a lot of it appears disorganized and thus is hard to really delve in to. And I had trouble loading some of the videos.

I thought Witness’s YouTube Human Rights Channel was much more fascinating, largely because the videos were better organized so I could delve into an area and see multiple things that I knew would be related. And it makes sense that their site would be better organized, as it appears to benefit from a full-time professional curator, and potentially others on the Witness staff, who help verify, choose and organize the content.

But this highlights another strength of Engage Media: It is more democratic. It appears that pretty much anyone can post. Maybe that is why it is somewhat disorganized, because perhaps people choose which topic their items should go under. So while the material and overall organization of it will be rougher, the content itself lends itself better to authenticity. This parallels the direction of media in general: Anyone can shoot a video and put it on YouTube. Anyone can post a photo on Instagram. Anyone can write about their views and observations on Twitter or their own blog. It’s messy and it’s imperfect, but it is more democratic than the historical/traditional forms of media because there few to no gatekeepers anymore.

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2 comments to Week 2: Natalie Henry Bennon, response to Engage/Witness viewings

  • jarrattt@uoregon.edu

    I agree with you that was a little intimidated by pages and pages of videos on EngageMedia with no way of picking “the best” stuff, though that kind of hierarchy would be against what you have pointed out is a more democratic site. I wanna be open to that and just go with the random picking and choosing, but I do like some nice curation and highlighting. Guess that might be the job of a good blog about EngageMedia? Blogs do seem to be the curation spaces for other parent sites from which they pull their material, which is kinda what we are doing in our own projects.

  • hdemich2@uoregon.edu

    Indeed! To be able to work with a site of material that is constantly in dynamic re-alignment would be one way for journalists to go deeper and reframe, tell a new story, and explain the material for their own particular audiences.

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