Chapter 7. the Mass Media and the Political Agenda Vid: New Media Makes DNC Most Open Convention

Chapter 7. The Mass Media and the Political Agenda Vid: New Media Makes DNC Most Open Convention - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6ZuYoOedqg

The future of media can be found behind the walls of one of Charlotte's oldest buildings.

Bruce Clark EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE PPL To juxtapose that against all the digital content creators here, the future of media is quite an interesting experiment.

The experiment known as the PPL is under the direction of Bruce Clark.

["Chris and Eric!"]

He calls it an alternative newsroom of sorts for the kind of media that either can't afford or can't get into traditional media spaces at the Democratic National Convention.

The digital age has allowed us to tear down a lot of walls and provide access to folks who generally wouldn't have access to information.

Those folks in this room just a few blocks from the convention include bloggers, instagramers, tweeters, and independent filmmakers, like Tim Grant.

Tim Grant FILMMAKER I think that new media has changed convention coverage just by the scope of the coverage. The ability to tweet what you see, you know, take a picture at any moment. It's so broad now, I mean you can type in hash tag DNC and you're getting 100 new tweets every other minute.

Kane Farabaugh VOA NEWS On the first night at the DNC those figures were not in the hundreds, but in the tens of thousands, setting new records according to Twitter's Adam Sharp.

Adam Sharp TWITTER So before Michelle Obama had even started her speech, she had broken the record for the Republican Convention, finishes her speech at 28,000 tweets per minute. Almost exactly double Mitt Romney, interesting enough, double her husband's performance at the State of the Union earlier this year.

Sharp says the online service Twitter, which allows users to send and read text-based messages, has changed the way politicians, reporters, and content producers reach audiences. We've moved from a 24-hour news cycle to a 140 character one.

But while filmmaker Tim Grant welcomes the access and the flood of options to get his online news that comes from it, he says there is a downside.

The filter is gone. I think in some ways that hurts because you don't really know what to look for, you don't know what to trust in some cases. But I think that if you really wanted to find something out you have the access now. You don't have to depend on just a handful of networks to be able to give you coverage.

Networks that now have to compete with new media producers who can reach audiences at a fraction of the cost.

Kane Farabaugh, VOA News, Charlotte, North Carolina.