Chapter 4 & "Making Media That Matters….In Minutes"

Really glad we decided to split up the readings. It makes it much more manageable and it makes the wife happier that we can spend time together.

So I’m going to try to read and blog at the same time again. Didn’t really work as well as I had hoped last time, but here goes:

Chapter IV:

• Right off the bat, that adapted quote from Marx on pg 121 is an important one. The past plays an important role in everything, the media included.
• There’s a great thesis topic, “The educational value derived from ‘the Flintstones’ and ‘the Jetsons’: Past v. Future”. That’s pretty funny that networks were able to pass those two shows off as educational in order to satisfied the 1990 Children’s Television Act.
• I wonder if journalists get bored. I wonder if they get stuck in a rut, doing the same thing over and over again. That’s what I didn’t like about journalistic writing. It was like a math formula. I hated the funnel format because I didn’t feel like it gave me enough room to be creative.
• The Clayman study is intersting. I expected that editors would fight for one of their writer’s stories to hit the front page. That they tend to midly support the stories was suprising.
• Bennett’s 6 Key Practices (p 133) are very valuable!
• All of those spin offs of Survivor are lame. Is imitation really more successful than the alternative? Or are they just easier?
• It’s just occurred to me that they’ve spent a lot of time talking about newspapers here and only a page or two about the Internet. I guess that is because of the age of this text, and we’ve talked about that in class. If newspaper readership is really dwindling, then what structured forms of news media is taking its place?
• The star is the key. Look at Katie Couric and how the CBS Evening news is doing.

Making Media That Matters…In Minutes

• A great way to teach kids about media literacy – through hands on experience.
• I’m sure they love doing these little films.
• The movie awards nights must be a hit