Media Critique 26 September

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/25/world/gallery/china-baby-pandas-chengdu/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

The article above is on cnn.com's world homepage. This article violates the principle of making the important interesting. While this story might be of interest to some people, it isn't important to a large population and it isn't very significant. For example, the other stories on the world homepage are about Syria and the massacre in Kenya. These stories affect the whole world in a more significant way than artificially-bred pandas. Certainly, pandas are interesting, but are they important? Not really. A way to improve the problem is to have journalists take a more important story and put it on the front page.

Class Response 26 August

The very first lecture we had in J1 was about the nine principles and seven yardsticks of journalism. I wasn't all too surprised at what these are, to me they seemed common sense. The one thing I didn't really expect is that out of all of the principles, watchdog is considered the most important. I didn't think about how someone has to keep the government in check, and I suppose journalists really are the best choice because of all the access they have to the government and people of power.

Response to Class 9 September

In class on the ninth we learned about newspapers and John Peter Zenger’s famous court case. I think that the ruling they made set the foundation for journalism. Imagine how many famous cases, such as Watergate or Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, might’ve been written off if the people involved had been able to sue the journalists for libel or slander and make the case go away! I feel like the idea that the truth is the ultimate defense should be applied more in real life.

Response to Grayson's Blog

http://graysonsmit.blogspot.com
On his blog, Grayson has an entry talking about how magazines played a role in "establishing our national identity." For one, I thought that was a really nice way to word it, but also I agree profusely. I never really thought about the history of magazines or how they started out very generalized. I guess I always thought, since there are so many different magazines out there, that they started out targeted to niche audiences. Grayson did a really good job with wording his entry.

Response to Camille's Blog

http://snazzysnazzgs.blogspot.com/2013/09/class-response-mass-communication.html
The link above will lead you to Camille's blog entry about the mass communication lecture. In her entry she points out how really cool mass comm actually is, when you think about it. I thought that her response was really well written and I agreed with my of the points she made. The SETDI process is complicated but it's really cool to think how it all works together to get information out there. Anyways, I thought Camille did a spot on job with her class response.

Response to Class 19 September

So we talked about recorded music in class on the nineteenth. This was really interesting to me personally because I'm a big music person and I constantly have my headphones in, listening to (recorded, of course) music!I never really thought of my iPod being used for mass communication before, but as we talked through things, they started to make sense. Before J1 my idea of "mass media" was newspapers and magazines and the like, and recordings never really crossed my mind. But you often do hear people talk about how music can carry messages. Also, when an artist or band releases a new album, they don't get immediate feedback, and you have to use technology to listen to it, whether that technology is something modern like an iPod or something a bit outdated but as an 8-track. So after Mr. Miller talked class through it and I was able to think some about it, recorded music looked more and more like a mass medium to me.

Response to Class 5 September

In class on September 5, we discussed the medium of books. A lot of what we talked about had to do with Johann Gutenberg and how his invention, the printing press, affected society. Just sitting back and reflecting, I realized how different life would truly be with out it. We'd probably be stuck back in the age of the Roman Catholic Church and society would be really unknowledgeable. I almost certainly wouldn't be here writing this now, because if we didn't have the ability to mass produce physical books and things then we most definitely wouldn't be able to mass produce virtual ones. I doubt that we'd even have the technology that we have now. I'm really glad that Gutenberg came up with this truly life-changing invention!