Jay Rosen, author of the article “When Starting from Zero…”, gives advice to beginners of journalism who don’t know how to put their foot out the door, and need guidance in order to fulfill their future careers. His idea of knowing “everything about something” truly applies to our current group work because we like journalists, need to be experts in the areas that we are researching. When somebody wants to go into journalism, they need to look through a lot of research and figure out what is the most relevant and specific information about their topic. It is their job to deliver that to their audience in a way where they can consume the material, and trust the ethos of the author, who they believe knows a majority of what they are talking about.
With our group project, we need to know “everything about something” in order to achieve our mission statement. If we do not know everything about the various subcultures of Disney, our ethos is ruined, and we fail at communicating our goals. By knowing everything about Air Pirates, Disney cats, DisneyBounding, Dismaland, and Disney food, we are able to act as real journalists, producing material that is rich and substantial for a big audience.
Rosen also notes, “The audience knows more than you do on some subjects so be social, ask for help and correct quickly” (Rosen). Just because you know everything about something doesn’t mean you know everything about everything. You will miss something, in which your potential audience may know more about. Rosen states that that is okay. You can know the basics, but it is important to be interactive and talk to others to know the nit and gritty of what you are truly talking about. I feel like with our project, this is a very important point. While we may all be Disney lovers, we do not know the end all be all of the Disney corporation or Disney when our parents or grandparents were our age. By talking to people who lived through certain experiences or have written about events can make us better reporters and open our eyes to ideas and concepts that we had never heard of. Asking for help is perfectly okay, and as long as you correct the incorrect information in a timely manner, your journalistic career still holds in the balance.
For our project, I feel like we are already accomplishing Rosen’s first point to journalists with no big credentials: “Start a niche news service on a subject some people care a lot about” (Rosen). While we are still working on knowing everything about something, we indeed choose a subject that people care a lot about. Disney is such a controversial company, and it has its obsessive fans, who dress up in cosplay, and its cynical haters, who create works of art to criticize everything about it. By choosing a topic that will create discussion, we are already doing the right job; it is only now that we expand the knowledge that the people have, so they are better qualified in understanding what Disney is about.
kyleokane 