Alan Sloan

Allan Sloan had a long and successful career working for Newsweek Magazine which culminated when he was appointed editor of Fortune Magazine. Born in Brooklyn, Sloan won two lifetime awards throughout his career as a journalist.

Yesterday Allan Sloan talked to a group of SMU students eager to discuss an important issue: is journalism dead? Sloan addressed the issue at the William J. O'Neil business lecture in Crum Auditorium.

Sloan thinks journalism is for sure not dead. He has been working for 40 years and was hired by seven employers. According to Sloan, the main problem with journalism is the low paycheck one gets at the end of the month. In order to be able to be an accomplished journalist you have to learn to work through difficult situations, to persevere and keep going even when times get rough.
Sloan said that people want to know what is going on in the world, and our job as journalists is to explain it to them in a clear and simple way.

Sloan dedicated a part of his speech to talking about his take on business journalism. When a student asked whether it would be better to major in journalism and minor in business or vieversa, Sloan said he had no idea. His conference was confusing in some parts as he really jumped from one topic to the next with little connection between them.

At the end of the conference he made a joke which I will not report as it was a bit vulgar, but that stated what he had been telling us throughouth the whole lecture: there is always a story, even when you don't think there is one. All you have to due is keep looking until you find it.

Sloan said he thinks eventually newspapers will fade away, however not any time soon. I remain curious, jsut like Sloan, of what journalism will be like in the future, and of the new ways journalists will find to present news.

Global Blogging

It was Christmas vacation when my brother got really upset over a book he just read with a bad ending and the first thing he said was: "I can't wait to get on a computer destroy the book in my blog.".

Kline and Burstein's book "Blog!" definitely got two points right about blogging: it is global and it is metaphor of interactivity.

Blogging has become global. My brother is Italian and he is 18 years old. Through blogging he thought his opinion on the book would get around. The book was a fascinating tale with a very weak ending, and my brother wanted to let possible readers know that it was not worth buying this book, that it was disappointing.

No matter what part of the world you live in, you can blog, you can express your opinion, you can tell people what you know, what you have found out, what you care about. The best part about blogging is that you quickly find out that other millions of people have an opinion about the exact same subject, or simply about a blog post you wrote.

I used to think people who spent their day on the computer - such as my brother - were not social people and were sitting in front of a machine plugged into the wall. By reading and discovering more about blogging I have discovered a whole world I was not familiar with. Not only can you share knowledge and opinions with people who live in the same city you live in, but also with people who are on the opposite side of the world. Even though I have to stick to my opinion that spending too much time on the computer makes him a bit anti social, I must admit blogging allows him to voice his opinions to people he would otherwise never be able to talk to. His post can influence people he doesn’t' even know. It is therefore both global and metaphor of inactivity.

In the introduction to the book, Kline and Burstein say bloggin has always existed and use as an example DaVinci's diaries, as well as several other diaries.

I have to disagree with them. When I think of blogging I think of a personal opinion on a certain matter and not an expert's view on a subject.

Even though it is true that lots of experts blog on their subject of expertise, how do you know which bloggers to trust? How do you know that the person who posted his comment is an expert about whatever it is he's posting about? Online, you can change your identity, you can pretend you are a different person from the one you actually are. Even though someone identifies him/herself as an expert, you are the one who has to choose whether to believe them or not.

Comparing a genius’s journal to a blogger is a bit of an insult to DaVinci, I believe.
I agree with Kline and Burstein's that diaries are the ancestors of blogs, however, blogs have developed in something different today.

Just as Kline and Burstain said, blogs restore “the lost voice of the ordinary citizen in our culture.”