Final Exam - Book Review: Comparing Journalism 2.0 and The Principles of Convergent Journalism

Reading the chapter 5 and chapter 6 of Journalism 2.0, this book provides me some insights of the new trend of journalism field for journalism students. The book ambitiously thrives to fulfill the purpose of telling “how to survive and thrive”, however, it pathetically fails. Inspired by the term Web 2.0, the journalism 2.0 focuses a handful of details on topics such as how to blog and how to write for the web, but sometimes it focuses too much on those web-related topics, like Web 2.0 and FTB, MB, RSS, oh My!, but neglects the "journalism" aspect of it. It definitely looks more like an information technology guidebook to me.

Compared to the Principles of Convergent Journalism, again, Journalism 2.0 fails to look into the bigger picture. The PCM successfully explains the journalism transformation from other media to new media, such as from print to internet or from broadcast to internet. These guidelines are tremendously useful for a journalism student as he or she can easily figure out what this transformation means at all. And also, looking as a whole, the information in the book is definitely more manageable, digestible and understandable. Imagine a plain world map comparing to a google map which tells you the direction, the distance and the way to get there. You get the idea.

To be fair to Journalism 2.0, its own strength is to be able to tell a great deal of information, especially the new technical terms, in a very short and simple way that students can easily grab the materials. The chapters include interviews with experts in journalism field and some inspiring quotes that are trendy and practical enough. Readers are thankful for simple and useful bullet points and no unnecessarily fancy and distracting graphics that are just simply too much for a book like this. Overall, Journalism 2.0 is successful as a friendly guidebook for faculty, students and journalists.

The Principles of Convergent Journalism is highly recommended for anyone who is eager to see what convergent journalism is about. Inside the book, stories on how and why the convergent journalism is formed, how journalists deal with it and the real stories of this seemingly unreal title are there for people to see the world outside the classroom. A very good point for this book is that a tremendous amount of examples like the website of WTKR-TV or a blog for The Herald of Rock Hill are provided for the readers to see vividly what exactly happens in the newsroom.

Otherwise, unlike Journalism 2.0, the PCM smoothly moves around among different platforms, from print to broadcast, from news to blog, capturing the most practical techniques, knowledge and advices for the journalists these days. Its way of arranging the topics is not only a flat one-way but multi-dimensional and bidirectional. For example, the book explaining how to perform a repurposing content of a newspaper story for an online article is an important lecture the student and journalists want to and need to know. They are just very practical. On top of that, the book even gives issues like scannability and linkability of a website that are some impactful advices that Journalism 2.0 fails to provide.

Last but not last, the last chapter of the book discussing the future in convergent journalism is the beacon of future in journalism that a MCOM 407 cannot afford to miss.


(To Dr. Spaulding, this is the edited version. Sorry for some spelling and grammatical mistakes on the paper I submitted earlier.)