HI,
My name is Sahana Jayaraman, and I’m a journalism and criminology/criminal justice double major at the University of Maryland. Pleased to meet.
I’m part of the university’s Media, Self and Society Scholars program, which gave me the CPMS 225 course during the first semester of my sophomore year. There, we learned all about media theory, the news agenda, and more — but first, we talked about the ways mass media has changed throughout the ages.
We delved into that initial topic enough to get us set up for the rest of the class, but not enough to sate my curiosity. I began to wonder whether social media — perhaps the newest and most unique form of mass media — has made any ripples in the news industry. As a student journalist, I’ve seen how social media has infiltrated the newsroom and established itself in the creation of an entirely new desk, meant solely for social engagement.
And thus, my final project for CPMS 225 was born: this blog, The Engagement Desk.
Here, I will use consecutive posts with a mix of fact, scholarly analysis and my own voice to answer two simple questions:
How has social media changed how we produce, distribute, and consume news?
and
Has it been beneficial or negative to the news industry, overall?
Each of my posts will explore a different topic about the role of social media in the newsroom, and my final post will contain the conclusions I’ve drawn from my analyses and a short section with some (hopefully saucy) thoughts from ~yours truly~.
At the end of each post, I’ll provide you with a [TL;DR] section—essentially my conclusions from the post, and (of course) a bit of engagement: a tweet of 140 characters or less that sums up my thoughts on the topic.
Enjoy!
- SJ
OMG! Love this idea! Getting started now....
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