Friday, 17 October 2014

Digital News Production Unit- Collecting Social Media Opinions

Today while the script was being edited by Andrei in preparation for out shoot of my scenes for the U2 story this Sunday, I have decided to collect some opinions from social media users to find out exactly what their opinions on the free U2 album would be. I did this by basically searching twitter using the hashtag- "U2".
It is important to remain impartial with opinions when broadcasting news so as not to sway the viewer one way or another, and so I decided to find a mixture of both positive and negative posts which have been made by the online community.

Here are the opinions I collected, which I then added to a word document and uploaded to our Google Docs account for future reference, and also so Roxanne, Andy and Andrei can view them and add to them if need be:

As you can see, there were a lot of negative comments towards the album posted via twitter, a lot of them mocking U2 and Bono for the decision to have the album put on people's phones without their permission. Of course, I also made an effort to find comments defending the decision also.

A lot of these comments were buried amongst the negative ones however, and the ones I did find were far and few between. As such, I decided to actually visit U2s official website and check their comments section. I believed that any fans of U2 that were willing to defend the band or praise them for their work would probably choose to do so through the band's official website. I was correct in assuming this, as I found that the band's website was full of people praising their work and thanking the band for releasing the album for free.

 We probably won't use all of the comments and opinions listed in this document, but it helps to have a selection to choose from. Also, the username of some of these users and locations etc will probably be censored for their privacy, and in the actual news broadcast, they will be introduced in ways such as "One user had this to say..." as opposed to using their name or screen-name.
These comments will probably appear in the film as a graphic onscreen, along with a voiceover reading the comment.

No comments:

Post a Comment