The Big Idea: Government Shutdown

      As many of you all know, the United States government was shutdown because the Republicans and Democrats could not agree on an idea created by Obama, called Obamacare. Obamacare was declared constitutional, yet most Republicans were not fans of it. Because of this massive disagreement, Republicans demanded that the government shall be shutdown until they got what they wanted. This government closing was no easy decision. People (except Congress) who worked for the federal government were forced to take off from work. Federally-owned national landmarks had to shutdown immediately. What about people that planned vacation trips to visit Yellowstone National Park, for example, and were not permitted to go because the government was closed? What about all of those people who had to leave work because of a silly argument? In these cases, money is being spent and wasted. This was not fair. I fell like there were other ways to solve this problem, but shutting the government down would have never come to my mind. Thank god that the government is officially back open for business now, but that was not a fun time for America. 

The Big Idea: Radio

    One important thing that we have talked about over the past six weeks is that radio was a media that changed the world at the time that it was invented. Radios were the first media to have the ability to deliver breaking news at a moment’s notice. While newspapers had to wait until the next day to give out important news and televisions had to wait until their next broadcast, radios wouldn’t have to wait. It was almost instant, something that the other medias can not say.

The Big Idea: Parts of a Newspaper

     In order to create a newspaper, a lot of elements must be used to have a “correct” and “proper” newspaper. First off, all newspapers have nameplates. A nameplate is the name of the newspaper, like The New York Times, for example. Other important elements include banners, bylines, datelines, leads, columns, inside boxes,  ears, and so much more. You can look on any regional or national newspaper, and you should find yourself most to if not all of these things. A newspaper is not just news on paper. There is so much more to it.

Good Responses To Good People

Drew did a superb job talking about the field of movies and how they play a role in society. Movies are both an immersive and social experience. When you go to the movies, most people go in groups. If you go individually, its seems weird. Now, I’ve never gone to a movie by myself in my life. That’s the social aspect of the movies. Another thing is that people always have had the urge to see things first. People don’t want to wait for a movie to come out on DVD when they can see it two months before the video release in the movie theater. Drew discussed all of these topics. Good job Drew!!!

http://alfrey99.blogspot.com  

Good Responses To Good People

Jamie did a great job of really not leaving out anything important on her most recent post on advertising and public relations (PR). I like her videos that she added, as Dumb Ways To Die will truly become one of the greatest successes for not just public service announcements, but one of the biggest Youtube sensations of all time. I like her descriptions when discussing advertisements, how they repeat the same things and how they make you remember their product for days to come.Good job Jamie!!!

http://jamiefightsbadjournalism.blogspot.com

Good Responses To Good People

Camille, a classmate of mine, did a good job on her Internet post. I like how she described so many things about it. Her facts were correct as well, like the Internet first being introduced to the world on October 29, 1969, now more than 43 years ago. She also described how basically all media is affected by the Internet, as everything always finds its way back to the world wide web. Good job Camille!!!

http://snazzysnazzgs.blogspot.com   

News Evaluation: By the Numbers

After evaluating each of the big four local news stations, I have made these conclusions:

1.) If you like news, then WDRB is the station for you. WDRB covered 333 in October, which is by far the most stories covered. The next station with the most stories has more than 100 less reported stories than WDRB, which was WLKY at 206. WDRB led in every news category except for crime, which had five less crime stories than WLKY, which had 108. 

2.) WAVE is full of fluff. This station had a total of 184 stories, and 15% of the news reported was put under the category “Celebrity/Fluff/Other.” Before doing this project, I actually watched WAVE if I watched the news. However, doing this month-long assignment made me realize that WAVE is full of fluff and stuff.

3.) The amount of time designated for commercials, weather, and sports is too long. For the news stations, the average time length for this period is around 15 minutes, which is half of the show. Half. 50%. That is way too long in my opinion. The show is called the news, yet half of the show isn’t even that. I have a hard time comprehending this. I understand that people need to know about the weather and traffic, but do we need to spend 15 minutes talking about it? I don’t think so.

*The link for the news data is in the previous blog.

Blues News

      Throughout this past October, my journalism class collected data that dealt with the news stories from local Louisville TV news stations (WLKY, WHAS, WAVE, and WDRB). Surprisingly, most of the stories that all of the news stations covered on were focused on crime. Yes, that’s right, crime. When people turn on their TV set when they get home after a long day at work or a busy day at school, they don’t want to sit down and learn about violence happening around their town. Most people are more intrigued about what is going on with the government, because after all, the government is pretty important to the American economy. The news is responsible for delivering its viewers with good and mostly relevant news. For example, WLKY doing a story on Kanye West running into a pole (yes, he actually ran into a pole, but WLKY has not actually reported on this) is a waste of valuable time considering a newscast is usually 30 minutes and nearly half of that time is eaten up by commercial breaks. So, my message to the news stations is this: stop committing crimes, and give the people effective, important news. 

Here is the link to the local news story breakdowns of October 2013: 

https://docs.google.com/a/manualjc.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah1epiOo9BqadE5HSmpyTW1mcmNUaWFLV2FLQlpTNnc&usp=drive_web#gid=0        

Good Responses To Good People (Second One To Classmate)

     Shout out to Zach for really putting together a nice blog. I really like how he did the post discussing the importance of newspapers. It is very neat and organized. I'm not saying they are not organized, it's just that that one specific article stuck out in my mind. He put it into a list format, which actually made it easier to read. Organization is important in writing, and Zach really demonstrated good organization there. Congrats, Zach!!!

     Here's the link to Zack's blog: http://zcblogs.blogspot.com    

Good Responses To Good People (First One To Classmate)

     Let me give a congratulations to Drew, who wrote a very good blog. The post he did about conglomeration is very good. It is very similar to mine in many ways, which is why I like it. I like how he added a graphic into his writing. It really blended well together, as he gave a good examples and really fit it in nicely with the other text. I also admire his media critique, which looked very professional to me. I was in awe when I read it. Drew came to play when he wrote it. Good job, pal. 

        Here is the link to Drew's blog: http://alfrey99.blogspot.com    

And The Response Is... (Fourth Response)

     A big focus that Mr. Miller wanted my class and I to do was look at the news everyday. Journalism is made up of news things along with other things, but news is the majority of what journalism covers. Every week, we take those infamous current events quizzes (and one-question quizzes depending on if we finished a lecture). There are ten questions and all you have to do is get five correct answers to get the "A." Simple, right? Not so much. You really do have to look up the local, national, and worldwide news on the web, because all of this news is included.

    This six weeks I was most interested in probably three major events that happened: the Bradley Manning trial, the cruel civil war in Syria, and most recently the attack in Nairobi, Kenya at the Westgate Mall.

     The Manning trial is about an American spy who fled the country and went to Russia, giving the Russian government all of the information about the American government. He is currently in Russia, earning citizenship there. Manning would like to come back to America, but the problem is he does not know what reaction and how severe the punishments would be if he returned.

     The civil war in Syria is like deja vu for the United States again. Our troops just came back from Iraq and now just a few months later we want to send them back to Syria and fight against them? This is not the answer. Obama spoke a few weeks ago and said that President Putin of Russia, which is allies with Syria, has developed a plan where Syria will give up their chemical weapons and peacefully hand them over without conflict. All I know is this; chemical weapons are unacceptable. They should be extinct and be 1000% illegal to use. Using gas to kill people was bad enough during the Holocaust, and now we are going to let Syria use them? I agree with Obama. We have to do something, but military combat and violence is not the answer.

     What many people are calling a "terrorist attack" in Kenya has now just recently ended, as there are a confirmed 67 deaths and over 70 people still missing in the Westgate Mall shooting. This is a tragedy. There is not much we can do about it now. Believe me, security levels have greatly improved around the world since al-Queda attacked the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. But the fact of the matter is that there is just true evil in this world. Religious beliefs and traditional customs are not an acceptable human behavior in this world. People are shooting people just to start violence. It's terrible, but there's not much we can do about it except trying to stop it as best as we can.

And The Response Is... (Third Response)

     The main focus of this unit during this six weeks was the focus of mass communication. We discussed group and individual communication as well, but we did not have as many in-depth conversations about those communication types. Mass communication involves a form of technological media that has the capability to reach a lot of people. Also, during the mass communication process, there is no immediate feedback. This means that if President Obama addresses the nation on television, many people watch it, but it is impossible for Obama to get immediate feedback as soon as the address is completed. Types of forms of mass communication include televisions, radios, public websites such as blogs and social media (this is the Internet), smartphones, magazines, newspapers, and billboard advertisements. These are just a selected group of mass communication types, as I am sure there are other ways and forms to spread mass communication. 

     There are five steps of mass communication: stimulus, encoding, transmission, decoding, and internalization. Stimulus is where an idea or thought develops in the brain. That thought is the converted into a message, which does not have to be spoken but can also be written down along with other ways to represent the message through a process called encoding. The message then travels through time and space to it's receiver, thus being the listener. This is transmission. The message is then decoded, or translated, through the decoding process to a language the receiver can understand. The final step is internalization, which is when a message is understood or interpreted by the receiver. 

     There can be times when this mass communication process is interrupted. The interruptions are made up of filters and impediments. Impediments are all of the noise distractions, such as environmental noise, channel noise, and semantic noise. Filters are when people are unable to receive a message due to a disability or mental issue. Filter types include physical, informational, and physiological types.

And The Response Is... (Second Response)

     Who would've thought that there would be so many rules and regulations of journalism. I mean, yeah, I figured that we would go over a plagiarism and cheating unit, as we did. I figured that Mr. Miller would discuss and reiterate that being truthful in your work is important, as it reflects upon the accuracy of one's work. I was completely overwhelmed when I learned that there were nine principles and seven yardsticks of journalism that we need to know. This was the largest packet that I have received so far in his class, which is good, because I hate packets. Especially thick packets. But as we went over the packet, I became more familiar and comfortable with my background knowledge on each of the principles/yardsticks terms. Stuff like being loyal, highlight the important and significant facts in your article, be fair when you right, don't be bias, and so on. I am praying now that there are no more principles and yardsticks to be learned, because I'm probably at my maximum point now when it comes to taking things and processing them into my brain and whatnot.

And The Response Is... (First Response)

     Over the past six weeks (yes, we are already six weeks in to the school year,) we have been discussing the many forms of media and how each of them functions and plays a role in society. One of my  favorite things that we learned this past six weeks is the concept of conglomeration. Yes folks, it's not just a really long words that's pretty fun to say over and over again. Conglomeration is when a company buys, or "eats up" the smaller companies to form a larger company in general. Disney, for example, is one of the six major conglomerated companies in the world. Disney owns several notable companies, including ESPN and the Disney Channel, of course. The pros of conglomerating a business is that more profit is made and that it is more efficient. The cons of conglomerating a business is that there is job loss, which leads to a decrease in competition and diversity of the content being produced. Overall, the idea of conglomeration is an important concept in not just journalism, but the economic world as a whole. 

Media Critique

      The New York Times is probably the most famous newspaper company in the world. Their newspaper has such of wide variety of stories published daily. ] In the “N.Y. / Region” section of their website, one of the main stories discussing the region of New York City is the cleanliness of the city’s canals, particularly the Gowanus Canal at this time. The Gowanus Canal is a canal that has been polluted for a very long time, and is highly contaminated. The company responsible for not protecting the safety of the canal has violated rules, according to the article, “ As Cleanup Plan Is Set For Gowanus Canal, Violations Continue”.

Not only has the company in charge of the Gowanus Canal is in violation of rules, but the article, written by Kia Gregory, has violated some rules as well. Those rules of course are the nine principles and seven yardsticks of journalism that every journalist should know. Although there were a lot of positives and strongpoints about this article, there was a few negative and incorrect uses of certain things going on in Gregory’s article. 

The way that the writer reported this article was done poorly at times. Gregory was up and down, left and right, and therefore was all over the place with her information. At one moment there is a key point at the beginning of the story. Next thing you know, another key fact is hinted towards the middle part of the story. And lastly, the conclusion that summed the article up and filled in all the holes where certain things were not stated at the time they should have been. A tip that Gregory should use is to try out the inverted pyramid method, which is all about writing the important information first and then the less but still important facts following those that are most important.

Gregory did not tell her story well enough in a would make a reader interested the entire length of the story. It was not intriguing enough. People probably won’t be talking about her story she published tomorrow because it is doubtful that they will even remember it. For example, when Gregory said that “The bulk of pollution was caused by long-closed factories and by decades of untreated sewage carried into the canal by city drains”, she waited until around the midsection of the article to state why the $500 million dollar cleanup plan is being put into action in the first place. The first thing she should be thinking before she writes her article is this: what does a journalist do to make their audience maintain interest throughout the entire story? And how can can a journalist make a story as interesting as possible? In other words, Gregory failed to make the important interesting. It just wasn’t significant enough for an audience to be attracted to it for that long of a time period.

The article as a whole was not too bad at all, as there were just a few blunders at all in the article. Yet there should not be errors and slip ups anyways, but then again, this is a media critique. Although this synopsis of Gregory's story may have been a little harsh throughout this article, the constructive criticism that was said benefits to whomever may read this blog. 

Here is the link to Gregory’s article (it is two pages): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/nyregion/as-cleanup-plan-is-set-for-gowanus-canal-violations-continue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&   

Jordan Gould