By: Maros Adamec
DENVER- The end of the winter quarter at the University of Denver is finally upon us. After 10 arduous weeks in the classroom and several days of final examinations, it is finally time for the students at DU to sit back and be relaxed Pioneers for a couple days until the spring quarter starts back up.
One aspect of the 10 week quarter that appealed to students in my curriculum is the Twitter.com portion of our MFJS 2240: Online and Visual Journalism course. Throughout our class period we had regular Twitter assignments requiring us to upload several pieces of current event news occurring via Twitter every several weeks. Having already maintained and cared about a Twitter profile in the past, I was nervous approaching this assignment, as the majority of my Twitter use consisted of comedy and memes from my peers from high school, and not anything newsworthy. However after delving into the first assignment, I was sold. Between the large amount of people who use Twitter daily, there are sources for breaking news regarding sports, politics, the film industry, and just about any niche business you can think of.
The variety of representation on Twitter gave me hope for our journalistic future. Sources were being cited by Tweeters, a massive step forward in credability, from a huge collection of news spheres. These include the collision of the sports world with politics and societal norms, drama featuring members of the United States government including senators and our president, and the exposure of several ongoing major world scandals (the Catholic Church and the American collegiate system).
These themes I just touched on were not mentioned for no reason. Throughout each of the Twitter updates we made during the quarter these themes either ended up in my final assignment submission, or were relegated to the cutting room floor for making my decisions on what content to include. Their relevance is not for no reason. Popularity from social media is more important than exposure otherwise, as it is your human, civilian peers who make the decisions on what content gets to be widespread. Ergo, each topic I chose to cover in my roundup of Twitter roundups had some sort of significant cultural impact, in my eyes. I thank you kindly for keeping up with my content throughout the year, and hope you agree with my points of view while delving into this last online story of mine.