If you didn’t know, Auto -Tune is a software program that alters singers' voices to achieve perfect pitch and when used too much it makes people sound electronic.
Usually a software that is used in the music industry and perhaps movies, it is now being used to present the news.
Auto-Tune the News, is a series of music videos on YouTube created and performed by the Gregory Brothers. The Gregory Brothers are Evan, Andrew, Michael, and Sarah Gregory (Gann 2009). They take real news broadcasts and edit them to make them funny and thus, more memorable.
Although the presentation of the news is hardly serious, it still projects the news and it is real news.
Mackey (2009) stated that they tried to mould speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Winston Churchill into contemporary pop songs, it can take a while for the lyrics to sink in, but once they do, it is hard to get these weirdly catchy songs out of your head.
That way, anyone watching the videos, whether they like politics or not, will retain some information of what is happening in the news or even in history.
As The Gregory Brothers once commented, “we’ve heard some very encouraging stories from teachers and other adults who have actually used the I Have a Dream video to refresh the speech for younger ears, with great outcomes.” (Gann 2009).
It may also a form of multimodal texts that students will encounter in their educational environment (Walsh 2006). As stated by Walsh (2006), there is an increased merging of communication within and outside educational environments.
I find Auto-Tune the News very intriguing as it helps to provide news to an audience that normally would show no real interest in it but through these videos they at least are aware of certain topics. Maybe even enough to fuel further discussions about it in the future.
According to Plotkin (2010) millennials are too busy watching videos on YouTube and they typically don’t care who made those videos, or if they have an agenda, as long as the video is entertaining. Therefore, viral videos do have a have significance in presenting news to their viewers no matter the form.
Featured below is a video from the “Auto-Tune the News” series.
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References
Mackey, R 2009, ‘Making the News Sing,’ The Lede, 29 April, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/making-the-news-sing/>.
Gann, P 2009, Special Interview with “Auto-Tune the News” Creators, The Gregory Brothers, Original Sound Version, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://www.originalsoundversion.com/special-interview-with-auto-tune-the-news-creators-the-gregory-brothers/>.
Plotkin, T 2010, ‘Marketers Need to Understand the Power of Viral Videos,’ Green Buzz Agency, 9 February, viewed 10 November 2010, < http://www.greenbuzzagency.com/marketers-need-to-understand-the-power-of-viral-videos>.
Walsh, M 2006, ‘The 'textual shift': examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
The New Story
The dawn of new trends and media publishing are constantly changing the way that news is reported and presented. Nowadays, most news media have their own Twitter and Facebook accounts to support their online websites and blogs. Even CNN has a Twitter account and it is currently in the top 15 most followed on Twitter according to Twitter Counter.
Twitter is a great tool for voicing one’s thoughts and opinion and giving quick news updates. But Twitter is just another stepping tool to what is to come. According to Condron (2010), curation is currently one of "the chosen" buzz words in the social media zeitgeist.
I mentioned before about Storify. It is one of a number of “curation” services that are trying to make it easier for bloggers or journalists to pull together real-time news from Twitter and other networks and make them into a coherent narrative (Ingram 2010).
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| Storify Testimonials *click to enlarge* |
Testimonials on Storify say, it is said to be the future of journalism and I believe it’s true. Journalist are able to combine real time tweets from real people together with credible news sources to give readers a story with a host of multiple points of views.
So how will this affect our current news media? It doesn’t. Not really. According to Naughton (2006), the reality is that while new communications technologies may not wipe out earlier ones, they certainly change the ecosystem.
Storify can be seen as a participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge, as described on Produsage.org (Snurb 2007).
Storify will just provide a new form of media; it depends on how people will use it to see its affects.
Finally, below is a video on how Storify works. Enjoy. Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.
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References
Top 100 Users 2010, Twitter Counter, viewed 30 September 2010, <http://twittercounter.com/pages/100>.
Ingram, M 2010, Storify Wants to Pull Stories From the Stream, New Emerging Technology News and Trends: GigaOM Tech News, viewed 30 September 2010, <http://gigaom.com/2010/09/29/storify-wants-to-pull-stories-from-the-stream/>.
Testimonials 2010, Storify, viewed 30 September 2010, <http://storify.com/storify/testimonials>.
Snurb 2007, ‘Produsage: A Working Definition,' Produsage.org, 31 December, viewed 20 September 2010, <http://produsage.org/node/9>.
Naughton, J 2006, 'Blogging and the emerging media system,'
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