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Please visit my official blog at cyberbaguioboy. com.ph

Video of Pacquiao fight up

This was fast. The video clip of the Solis vs. Pacquiao fight is up online. Check it out.

(UPDATE 2) Pacquiao wins! (but...)

See the varying views and opinions of bloggers about the fight. Akomismo for instance did not mince words. Excerpt:

How do we define shameless? (Sa Filipino, walang hiya.)

• Vote Manny Pacquiao signs on top of a Filipino flag during an international, televised sporting event.
• Cheers of “Congressman!” after winning via knockout in round 8.

I’m tempted to scream, “Go to Hell, Manny Pacquiao.” But he’ll win the elections anyway, and that is a fate worse than hell.

I don’t have much love for the Pacman. Read the following essay for my reasons why:

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(I'm blogging here because my main personal blog is down!!! Wondering what's happening again).

Analysts say the fight was a mismatch. In fact, this blogger feels Manny Pacquiao does not deserve his money and was hoping to only watch the pre-main fight event of Arce vs. Mijares.

Excerpt:

I had really planned to order, watch, and score tonight's Top Rank PPV card featuring Manny Pacquiao v. Jorge Solis and Cristian Mijares v. Jorge Arce (the only fight on paper worth paying anything for), but then I sat down with my digital cable remote, went to the info, and worked my way over to the 'Buy' button.

And I couldn't do it. I had spent the last couple of days trying to rationalize why I would be paying to see Manny Pacquiao drill a sacrificial lamb, $44.95 for a big (quantity, not quality) card where the only thing I truly cared to see was Mijares/Arce. I couldn't figure out a good reason to order this show, save for my completist nature of needing to see every "big" fight.

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Did I say more? Hehe.

Thanks to NeTVision I was able to watch the fight "live" via the Internet. This is the future of television. It is delivered on your PC. Wohoo!

INQUIRER.net also delivered a blow-by-blow running account of the fight.

INQUIRER.net unveils blog network

Finally, INQUIRER.net unveils its blog network. Joey Alarilla, our resident game editor/blogger, admits he is the guinea pig in this project ;-)

Again you might ask, why do we blog? For INQUIRER.net, it is about extending the conversation with our readers. We get a lot of feedback from readers everyday. We hope to engage readers in a more, well for lack of term, interactive conversation. I've also been blogging for close to 3 years now. It started when my youngest daughter was born. Somehow, my blog evolved from being an online diary of my daughter into something more personal. It currently features my musings on blogging, technology, journalism, and recently, politics (since I cover the elections).

The INQUIRER.net blogs network aims to be not just any blog network. We hope to use it to make news your news too. And as Joey says, we also hope to take advantage of today's technology and use it to keep the conversation going. Happy birthday INQUIRER.net blogs!!!

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By the way, INQUIRER.net is currently co-convenor of Media Nation, a gathering of different news organizations in the Philippines.

Cyberbaguioboy down?

I got a shocker this morning. I opened my cyberbaguioboy blog and found it was inaccessible. Hacked, I thought. Servers down? Yesterday it was still fine. I wish my postings are still intact. sigh.

Videos on-the-go

I'm now taking more videos using camera phones. This is a recent addition to my job as a technology reporter. While this technology has been around for some time, news organizations have not really used this innovation to do interviews and capture important events. This year, we have increasingly used video clips taken using a camera phone. The quality is not as good as broadcast TV. But it is good enough for viewing on YouTube, which has been the host of videos I send over to our editors.

Here's an example of a video I took while covering the Commission on Elections.

Students prefer Internet news: study

A recent report from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force at Harvard University has revealed that schools look up to Internet news as a mode of classroom instruction. Excerpt:

Internet-based news is trumping both television news and the daily newspaper as a mode of classroom instruction. Furthermore, national and international news sites, such as nytimes.com and bbc.com, are trumping local news sites in America’s schools. These conclusions stem from a recent national survey of 1,262 social studies, civics, and government teachers, who reported on their use of news in the classroom, including trends in their use of particular media.

For close to a year now, I've been studying my Masters in Journalism through an online medium of instruction. So far, learning and interaction are a lot better especially for working professionals like me. Online education or e-learning combined with traditional methods of teaching is increasingly being introduced in undergraduate schools. This recent survey shows students prefer to get their dose of news from the Internet, which is a lot more convenient and interactive. From my own experience, e-learning still requires discipline on the student's part. You still have to actively participate in discussions (through discussion boards), online chats, and group work. So it is really important that Philippine government should connect more schools to the Internet. I think once they're connected, students will find learning a lot more interesting.

Week 8: The Internet is not for geeks only

Here's an interesting development in citizen journalism. BBC announced plans to offer training to citizens who want to go into "citizen journalism," according to an article in the Editor's Weblog, citing at least two sources.

Apparently, BBC wants to open up its in-house training program to the public. As I was reading this, I recalled Karen Lema's blog titled, "A little journalist in us." She somehow sums up the point that citizen journalists, bloggers, or mobloggers --for bloggers who use mobile devices --need to learn a thing or two about "journalism." They have to follow certain principles in journalism--which I completely agree with. These principles involve being objective, thorough, honest, balance, and truthful. BBC's move is clearly a move towards teaching these same principles to bloggers, CJs, mobloggers and whatnot.

But what is journalism, anyway? What do they do? Some say they're storytellers. Others say they make sense of facts and information they get and hopefully re-tell them straight to readers with much honesty and integrity. That's the ideal scenario. But over the years, we've seen the quality of journalism decline despite the ideals this vocation proclaims. Journalism has been maligned by the very people who preached objectivity, truthfulness, honesty, and transparency. The public has also grown tired of the traditional media.

Now, here comes the Internet allowing anyone to be a "journalist" and the traditional media is now trying to figure out where they fit in. For sometime, traditional journalists saw the Internet a fad and hoped it would go away. But it didn't. It changed and still continues to change the face of journalism.

It's correct to believe that the Internet or technology per se are just tools, which journalists can use in their practice. However, these very same tools are now available to everyone to disseminate information While journalists proclaim they had years of training and experience, the public's collective and collaborative efforts have slowly matched what media had been offering: information. Are they doing journalism? No or perhaps not yet.

Bottomline: I would be slow to dismiss all these developments in technology and journalism as fads. While our roles as journalists will not change very much in the future, we should also understand how these things will work for us and not against us.

And to end, here's an interesting quote from colleague and Filipino journalist and blogger Joey Alarilla's column from INQUIRER.net:

We are living in an age where we can shoot videos and take photos using our mobile phones, and upload these on the Web for use with articles. This is far cheaper and speedier than the old way of having a TV reporter, camera crew, producer and editor create a short segment on television. And you can already shoot the video with the Web in mind, with an understanding of how it will complement the other elements in your multimedia story.

This is what many in Old Media still don't realize, that we have to create content for the Web, instead of just uploading shovelware.

Week 7: On-the-go journalism and web 2.0

When bombs went off in Mumbai, the first thing I did was go to Flickr (click photo to see more) and YouTube to check photos and videos taken by people who might have witnessed it. These popular social networking websites now allow people to capture history. In today’s wired world, the unfolding of events can be documented almost instantaneously with technology. But can we describe this practice journalism?

Armed with a phone camera, I have been taking snapshots of events/people while on field since last year. But due to frustrating speeds of sending photos via today’s local mobile network, I still download these photos onto a PC before sending it to my editors. Perhaps this is the first step towards mobile journalism. (Also listen to the short podcast I did).

Mobile journalism involves Internet technology and telecommunications. Both are modern tools for delivering news on-the-fly. When I started working for an online publication six years ago, the standing order was to: “write for today and not tomorrow.” Today, that has changed to: “break the story now and add photos, videos and audio quickly.” Sounds like a lot of work? Yes it does. But since the Internet is multimedia, people expect more from journalists (who do not necessarily work for the online medium) to also produce photos, videos and audio. Mainstream media is now looking at hiring younger and more tech-savvy journalists to cover news because they understand readers' behavior today.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a blogger observed how fellow bloggers attending this big event have become source of “scoops” and “inside information.” Not every journalist could cover this event alone. But they have provided "just in time" information for mainstream media. He called it “instant journalism.” I simply call them “leads.”

Week 6: CJ is still journalism gone hi-tech.

I recently had a brief online exchange with a colleague on how bloggers and journalist would soon become "one." He disagreed, stressing bloggers and journalists have clashing values. Journalists follow established standards, while bloggers don’t. But in countries where media is censored, blogs have only been the means to do “citizen” journalism.

Citizen journalism is an idea that can be broken down further to understand what it is. Journalism is a "profession," for some a vocation. This title has often been given to people who work for media organizations. Their role is to deliver news that hopes to help citizens make better and more informed decisions.But the act of doing journalism does not necessarily mean one has to be employed in a newspaper.

With the Internet and blogs, regular people are now empowered to do journalism. That is if they follow the ethical "standards" of thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence.

Dan Gillmor says it best: “Technology has given us a communications toolkit that allows anyone to become a journalist at little cost and in theory with global reach. Nothing like this has ever been remotely possible before.”

But to quote Spiderman: “With power comes great responsibility.”

I believe citizen journalism is journalism the way it was, or the way it should be. Citizens now have been given back the power not only to consume but also “pro-duce” news, as Gillmor puts it.

What blogs have done to journalism is make citizens part of the news process. Bloggers won't replace journalists. But both will be working together in the future to deliver a better version of the news. Call this the future of journalism. But I would simply call it journalism with stress on the citizens.