What is News??

There are many different means of acquiring the news whether it is in the newspaper, watching it on television, or now one of the most popular, the internet. The news paper being around for the longest time still is slowly growing in amount of readers but it is not getting the same numbers as it did before. In the book Media Literacy by W. James Potter it states, "Only about 45% of American Adults read newspapers regularly" (Potter 125). The majority of the people that read the paper are senior citizens. Many people now get their news from the internet.

The internet is vastly growing with different web sites to get todays and yesterdays news. Now there are local community papers that are on the internet. When I used the site CyberJournalist, I found that there are many links that took me to citizen journalism sites. The specific site that I chose was http://northfield.org/. It is used so that the citizens of Northfield can talk about what is going on within their community.

The great thing about this site is that there are not the same constraints that are discussed in Media Literacy by Potter on page 103. These include deadlines, resource limitations and geographical focus. There are no deadlines that need to be made when you have a site like this. People can post whenever and whatever they want that deals with what is going on in their community or what is going to happen. The items that are posted tend to be things that are going to happen. It seems to focus mostly on promoting what events are taking place or will be taking place.

By using these citizen sites it also keeps from having your resources limited. Anyone in Northfield is able to post on it. This allows people in the communities to write what ever they want without having the restrictions such as the news stations or the editors of the papers.

It does however have a geographical focus for the area of Northfield. This site was made for the community of Northfield and talks about things that occur there. It does not focus on what is happening around the world like many other sites do.

This being said, I have learned that there are many different means of gaining the news. When I learned about this different way for people to communicate with each other I found it very interesting. People being able to get their opinions and events out in the news without someone turning them down could be a new beginning to the media.

The new season of Survivor: Fans vs. Favorites seems to have a clever idea behind it. To think putting fans up against the favorites seems like it could have its positives and its downfalls. Alex from the fans' statement seems to show a valid argument to media literacy.

The show demonstates from media literacy a concept that we discussed about traps that we fall into. I believe that Alex makes a stong argument in this case of having an advantage that they have seen how the players acted while they were on the show before. She says that she knows their "game" but I feel that is where the traps come into play.

Even though they saw how people acted over the course of their shows, Alex and the other fans do not see even close to what all happens behind the scene. There is so much that goes on when the camera is not on and I feel that the fans should realize that there are other things to concider.

The series Max Headroom was a show that presented 20 minutes into future. It did not last for anymore than a season. Even though it did not last that long while it was on it presented media literacy though the concept of knowledge structure.

In this show the world that they live in is very media oriented. These impact the knowledge structure of the viewers because the television is on all the time and can be interrupted at any time. The two major news channels were BreakThru and Network 23, these news channels went to extremes to get viewers and to increase their ratings.

While the viewers are watching these shows all the time it makes them more vulnerable to the things that are told to them through the television. This would change their knowledge structure from being very broad to a very narrow point of view because of the repitition that they experience. This takes away from their outlook of how they precieve the world to be. This could create a single minded, uniform society. This is why in Max Headroom it does display a broadened view of knowledge structure in media literacy.