Bebo- a Journalist’s first step.
With my term essay deadline drawing ever closer, I have taken some steps in researching it. Apart from publishing a quiz, which can be found on www.freeonlinesurveys.com (do it please. Thanks to those who already have!), I have been examining Bebo in great detail, since I am a member of this particular social networking site. Whilst doing so, I made some important discoveries.
The majority of people are familiar with the blog module of each Bebo site. Here, members are free to express themselves. They can update their blog on a daily basis with their views or opinions. Depending on the length, the newest blog is displayed along with the previous one. If a viewer is interested in an older blog, it is possible to view every blog ever entered, simply by clicking on the word ‘Blog‘. Personally, I chose to leave so lyrics on mine and rarely ever change it.
In addition, I noticed something new. The section is entitled ‘Bebo Authors‘. Here budding writers can upload pieces of their work to be read by other members. There are dozens of genres to cater for the majority of writers, including the favourites, such as ‘fiction‘, ‘non fiction‘ and ‘horror‘, to the slightly obscure including ‘history’ and ‘health’.
I found this to be extremely interesting. I have researched this area a bit and found that this section has pre set genres, so in order to include proper journalistic pieces, you would in fact have to include them under ‘professional/technical‘, which as you can imagine is not currently very popular.
There is also a video option, if print wasn’t your thing. It is simple to upload your videos, which can either be done directly on Bebo or downloaded from Youtube.
Either way, Bebo are paving the way for journalists in the making. Having witnessed some of the videos however and read some blogs, the only concern is that journalism becomes a lackadaisical trade. Journalists will become disinterested in what they are writing about and there will be no direct focus and no filter between their brains and their fingers. I can only hope that my fears don’t become reality.
