Symposium Review

There were 4 presentations at the symposium I went to. The first talked about the differences between men and women watching conference. It discussed what types of things they look for and care about and even how a speaker's title in the Church may decide how quickly people fall asleep. The funniest fact was that women pay more attention to the Young Men's Presidency than men do.


The second presenter talked about how the Deseret News covered the 1978 revelation of blacks being able to hold the priesthood. Honestly, this presentation was just read from her paper and she never even really looked up at her audience, so understand her fully due to mumbling, but I think the topic was very interesting.


The third presenter talked about board games in the Mormon society and how the difficultly standards of LDS board games can effect members. What does it say about a person if they don't do well in a board game? What about those crazy, obscure questions, are members supposed to know all the answers? I think the topic was interesting, but I feel like it's unfair to tear something apart like a wholesome board game. I think the Church just supports old-fashioned entertainment and that's why these games are sold in Church stores, and they teach gospel facts as well! Yes, some questions are really hard and obscure, but have you ever seen Jeopardy? I just don't think the Church is trying to say some big message by each individual game question.


The fourth presentation was given by Danny Duerden, who was actually my 211 TA two years ago, so that was funny. He presented on the Church's Mormon Messages site hosted on YouTube. This is a channel on YouTube where LDS conference talks and Mormon ads are uploaded and anyone can watch them. Danny focused on the fact that a small handful of them had gone "viral." Meaning that while some videos only had one or two thousand views, some had 700,000 or more. He tried to examine what makes some of these videos go viral and what keeps other from reaching that same view count. He concluded that the videos that weren’t LDS specific reached the highest counts. So people from other religions felt okay about watching the videos that were about common morals and standards, while they felt that same public could not relate to talks about the Temple or other LDS specific topics.

Types of IR

Journalism comes in many forms. Some of the most exciting forms are investigative reporting, but also, through that comes the most boring.

There is Original Investigative Reporting (the exciting) and Interpretive Investigative Reporting and Reporting on Investigations (he boring). Original is when people can go undercover and reveal stories that no one has discovered yet. And though Interpretive and Reporting on Investigations can be thrilling, I feel like most times it just turns into a bunch of number and pie charts that I don’t care to read about.

This is the video on that I think the presentation wanted to show us but wouldn’t load. It is the Associated Press telling viewers how to do watchdog journalism. First of all, I think it is so cool that the organization would come right out and spoon feed the topic to a YouTube audience. Second, the people speaking do a very good job of telling this story of these tunnels and showing how watchdog journalism can help to better our society through stories like these.

When you type in “Investigative reporting” to google, a lot of really neat things come up. I saw some workshops on how to do it an and also this website http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/ . A website for investigative reporting? Really? How great is that?! Every story on there digs deep and gets to the heart of the matter through one of the types of investigative reporting. And to make it even better, many blogs of these reporters are linked through this site, so it is doing a wonderful job of working with the changing technologies.

Journalists Staying Independent

It is important for journalists to stay independent from the things that they write about because if they are too close to the subject, than that is personal. So it can easily turn into either PR love or hatred.

The debate we had in class was tough. I was put on a side that I did not agree with initially. Arguing that people should not have to disclose personal information. It really made me look for the reasons behind this argument, because naturally I would not come to that conclusion.

My major question was, well how much information is enough? Where people grew up, how old they are, if they had siblings, what cities they have lived in, where they went to school, if they have kids, if they are vegetarian… everything influences our point of view and therefore our writing. In class, some people made the argument that if you are vegetarian, that won’t influence the way you write about marriage. Though the majority of the population will agree with you on that, there are some people who will disagree. So do you only divulge enough information to satisfy the majority?

Giving all background information on a journalist will probably never happen. So is it better to give some than none? The risk with only shedding some light on their life is that it doesn’t give the full picture, and that can easily mislead people. This decision full of grey areas and I am glad I do not have to make it.

This CNN article talks about how journalists were told not to voice opinions but now some are asked to share. The reason? Money. Money is the reason they did not give opinions, and now it’s the same reason that they are. It asks the question, do people really want unbiased articles now or do they want a bias they agree with? If we disclose all information about journalists, than readers can easily find bias that they like.

This is a video talking about an NPR journalist who was fired for making “racist” comments. There was a lot of talk around this specific issue and trying to determine if this man was a “journalist” and should be held to that same standard. This journalism standard is what makes everything so hard. It’s not always clear. So when trying to figure out how to disclose information and how much, it’s just a guess. And everyone feels strongly about their own idea.