What IS News?

According to Media Literacy, “…news does not reflect reality. Instead, it is a construction of journalists.” This basic idea might change the way people look at news. News stories do not necessarily portray what is happening; rather they reflect what the journalist saw crammed into a few minute news story. In large news organizations, journalists do not have adequate time to fully explain a story and this results in the public only seeing parts of news stories. These problems have recently been combated by what are called “cyberjournalists.”

Cyberjournalists report on citizen journalism sites. Basically, the idea is that regular people (citizens) are able to act in the role of journalist and their stories are published through these websites. There are many different kinds of citizen journalism. The different types are discussed at Poynter Online http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126

One specific citizen journalism site is called Coastsider http://coastsider.com/. This site was designed specifically for residents of San Mateo County, CA to post stories that involve their community. Poynter Online described eleven different types or layers to citizen journalism. This site would most likely fall into the sixth layer: “The Stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version.” This means that it is not affiliated with a major news site and its contributions are made up entirely of citizen’s reporting. It appears that someone edits the stories for errors before they are posted onto the website.

This site allows people to post stories of interest. In addition to stories, videos, a community calendar of events, community related links, and town hall issues can be located on this site. Residents have the opportunity to share information with others in their community through this site, and the comments section allows community members to post responses to the stories.

Coastsider provides truly local news for the community. An advantage of this citizen’s journalism site is that it provides up-to-date information to local community members about events that could be important to them. Coastsider lists stories from most to least recent. Today it has stories as recent as yesterday. This new trend of citizen journalism provides previously unheard of opportunities for aspiring journalists or active community members to get their stories out to the public. Whether it be for a major news organization or just for the local community, citizen journalism sites provide great opportunities to hear from regular people.

Thinking Like a Survivor

It seems that Alexis, like so many unsuspecting television viewers mistakenly believes everything she sees on her favorite reality program to be true reality. Her statement indicates that because fans of the show have diligently watched every episode of every season, they completely understand the game and its players. She claims to know the strengths and weaknesses of the returning competitors. While she may be confident in her statement and her ability to play the game, she failed to consider that the hour of Survivor she watches each week cannot possibly represent everything that happened.
In total, survivors can play the game for a maximum of 40 days. That is a total of 960 hours. It is impossible and ill-advised to show every minute of everyday, and so in editing, hours and hours of footage are condensed into one hour of entertaining television.
In class we learned that one goal of the media is to entertain. In order to make survivor an entertaining show the content is edited so that only the most exciting events are viewed. Alexis's belief that this will be the best season yet because the returning players are evenly matched against fans is probably inaccurate at best, and may hurt her in the game at worst.

Max Headroom

In an episode of Max Headroom, a television show from the 1980’s, there were many references to media literacy. The show was had a futuristic setting that focused on the large impact television would have on people and society. One of the main focuses of the show was on media content.
According to James Potter, media content is one of five factors that make up a person’s knowledge structure. Knowledge structures are crucial in aiding a person to make decisions. Specifically, media content was focused on in this episode of Max Headroom.
Media literate people are aware of the different forms that media messages can take, and they understand how different messages are put together. The people in this Max Headroom episode were susceptible to whatever messages the television companies broadcast. They did not possess the knowledge structures that would allow them to make their own informed decisions.
This show predicted that if people passively accepted everything they saw on television the media companies would have too much control over what the public thought. While this show went to extremes, they made a good point about the need to actively and consciously evaluate media messages.