Musings of a sick (and hungry) person

With a high fever yesterday (because I got rained upon these past few days), I was not able to go to work yesterday. Call me a masochist or whatever, but I really hate missing work. For us, to be absent even for just one day means more tons of paper work when we come back. Darn.

Thank God I already finished writing my article for the August issue of the PJR Reports. Frickin' six pages long, single-spaced. And to think I told Don and Bimbo that I am only doing a one-page article. Talk about major babbling.

I am still feeling under the weather so I think I'm going to take it easy this weekend. I think it would be good to to stay away from the newspapers, TV news programs, and the Internet even for just the next two days. If only my eyes, which have retained its strained and reddened status for quite some time now, could complain and resign from my physical self. Tsk tsk. Plus a mild carpal tunnel syndrome is in the offing, the paranoid me thinks. On the other hand, I have to finish reading THE Book before Sunday, plus I promised my gang back home that we're going to watch the complete series of Deathnote (Thanks Tat!). And can I not really check the papers or even look at the Internet even for just a day ? Massive withdrawal syndrome alert. Haay, what to do, what to do.

And lest I forget again, congratulations to my former ethics teacher and current boss at the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, Luis Teodoro, who is one of four awardees of this this year’s “Many Faces of the Teacher” search. Here's Prof. Danilo Arao's entry on Sir Louie's win. I am very thankful I was his student, for I can't imagine the profession without Sir Louie. Sir, when are you going to treat us in Chocolate Kiss? Haha. (Picture at left from Chocolate Kiss site)

Before I go back to sleep, here's a journalist's guide to "crowdsourcing" as a follow-up to my earlier post about it.

A Journalist's Guide to Crowdsourcing
Source: Robert Niles, Online Journalism Review

Crowdsourcing, in journalism, is the use of a large group of readers to report a news story. It differs from traditional reporting in that the information collected is gathered not manually, by a reporter or team of reporters, but through some automated agent, such as a website.

Stripped to its core, though, it's still just another way of reporting, one that will stand along the traditional "big three" of interviews, observation and examining documents.

The core concept is not new in journalism. At its heart, modern crowdsourcing is the descendent of hooking an answering machine to a telephone "tip line," where a news organization asks readers to phone suggestions for stories. Or asking readers to send in photos of events in their community.

Such methods require substantial manual labor to sift through submitted material, looking for information that can be used well in a story. Which makes them only marginally more effective than traditional news reporting.

True crowdsourcing involves online applications that enable the collection, analysis and publication of reader-contributed incident reports, in real time.

Read here more.