New Age, New Media, New Rules
“Blogging is personal. It is SHARING something.” said Ruben Licera Jr., the first speaker of the Social Media and Campus Journalism Seminar themed “FORWARD UNITING NETIZENS (F.U.N.) through Campus Journalism.” It was held at the Engineering AVR of the University of San Jose-Recoletos last November 12, 2013 at around 3:00 in the afternoon. The event was spearheaded by USJ-R’s official student publication ‘FORWARD’, which aimed to reach out to fellow university publications around Cebu City through a gathering with the cooperation of renowned Cebuano bloggers in the cyber world.
Ruben Licera Jr., President of Cebu Bloggers Society (CBS) and the Young Minds Academy (YMA) Mentor, focuses mainly on Youth Empowerment and Community Management & Leadership. He was able to briefly discuss Professional Blogging and Social Media Users Responsibility through his dialogue “Communicating Passion & Advocacy Using Social Media.” He defined the new generation of journalists inclined with the social media as ‘new social media practitioners’ and was also able to differentiate ‘traditional’ from ‘alternative’ journalists. “Social Media Responsibility, in my personal definition, “is a form self regulation by an entity (individual or organization) in using the social media platform. It further emphasizes the value of being fully accountable to all the actions performed on these platforms.” Licera further explains.
As of October 6, 2013, there are around 1.26 billion Facebook users already all around the world by which means that Social Media should not be ignored. For the moment, everything is connected to internet. So Social Media User’s Responsibility is an important element of all the professional and aspiring bloggers around the world. “Advocacy is doing something expecting nothing in return yet accords each self with happiness or satisfaction. Continuous accomplishment of advocacy through frustrating and impeding circumstances is considered as Passion.” said Licera on his dialogue in correlation of the current status of the victims of super typhoon Yolanda.
The second part of the seminar was anchored by Nancy R. Cudis, Blogger of the Year in the 1st Cebu Media Excellence Awards and was a reporter of Sun Star Cebu. Her talk was on “How to effectively use social media in campus journalism.” Real time coverage, Crowd Sourcing (e.g. Foursquare) and Community Engagements like Storify are to name a few of the techniques and requirements in effective social media use in the campus premises. “I, for one, started as writers like you but before we didn’t have such technology and we had to take photos through cameras with films and preserve the negatives then develop them”, said Cudis in comparison of today’s convenience. Attribution was her main focus of the talk, on how it was important in every blog and article shared which was entirely related to Licera’s talk about Social Media User’s Responsibility.
Questions and follow-ups were entertained after the talk. Presentation of Certificates of the speakers and publications present in the seminar then followed.
