Title: Tracing Event Impact in the Web Sphere

With the advent of information technology, concerned denizens have shown great interest in the improved and more accessible communication means. Digital media has become one of the most important and effective means of communication due to the interactivity, accessibility, availability, and connectivity. We, as social beings, find this mean very applicable to our needs.

For many years traditional news – newspapers and television - sources were the general publics' only formal outlet for learning about the world around. With the advent of digital media - for example blogs and websites - these traditional news sources have been shaken to their very core. Digital media provides a new source of news deliverable where a wide variety of news and unlimited sources are provided.

Traditional media is a one-way communication channel between creator of the news, the journalist, and the recipient of the news, the reader. Digital media offers a stark contrast to this one-way communication channel by offering technologies that allow anyone to communicate by publishing online through a blog, or adding comments to previously published articles, blogging, video messages, photos, podcasting, and viral emails have all revolutionized the way we communication.

In this project we seek to answer how traditional media (radio journalism, newspaper journalist, and TV journalism) and digital media differ in their coverage of two specific events. What type of news and how it is presented, language, and voice, examine if it is edgy, striking, tend to attract attention, compelling, inviting, or conversational? How the reader responds to the different types and whether the different types of media encourage participation or improve the willingness of the general public to participate in news creation.

This project will trace specific news events that traditional media covered and new media covered to discover the nuanced differences between the channels of communication and its impact on coverage, willingness to participate, and style of coverage. We will examine one specific site:

Wanna-b-a-bride.blogspot.com
Ghada Abdel Aal, a young Egyptian lady, starts a personal blog to share her frustration about one of the social and the most sensitive issue in the Middle East especially for girls. Women, in general, won't be fully recognized by the society unless they are married. Her blog is written in such a humorous and inviting way which attracts thousands of people and number of traditional media locally and internationally.

Indeed, she is addressing a very important social phenomenon that many girls in the Middle East face, "I am one out of 15 million girls, between the ages of 25 and 35, who are pressured on a daily basis by their society to get married," says Ghada. In this inquiry, Ramsey and I will track all channels that reported this incident and examine the impact of each channel on the social sphere in the Middle East.

Our workplan was followed and update as below:

Project plan

Week Four -
Begin tracing events through web sphere.
Develop initial parameters to analyze and assess these events.

Week Five -
Finalize analysis parameters.
Map preliminary event tracing through both space and time.
Present midterm progress

Week Six -
Continue analysis and tracing of the event.
Conduct content analysis of social media sites and their coverage of the specific event.

Week Seven -
Conduct content analysis of traditional media sites and their coverage of the specific event.
Begin to conduct comparative analysis of content

Week Eight -
Continue comparative content analysis.

Week Nine -
Begin to assemble final contents for CD.

Week Ten -
Finalize analysis and turn in project.