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