2nd Six Weeks: Response to Ali's blog

     This post on Ali's blog made me laugh a little, but also I feel the same way. I am constantly going to the movies with friends to see a movie version of an amazing book I had recently read or just to see a really good actor/actress that I like. But I also agree that maybe it should go back to being more of a personal experience. When she brought that up it reminded me of a video I watched recently. It was a list of things that you should do alone at least once. On that list was going to the movies. That seems kind of weird now, but if you think about it, it could be really cool. You could get a lot more engaged with the movie, especially since there is no one talking to you about it, and you can experience more of the emotions fully, without being embarrassed. Like if you went to a sad movie or even a movie about a love story, you could cry without the fear of being judged.

Link to Ali's Blog post: http://alisinfoblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/response-to-movie-lecture.html

2nd Six Weeks: WDRB

     Another news organization that a group of people in my class have been following is WDRB. Something I noticed as I looked through the data that we have been recording is that WDRB's top news stories haven't been important on a large scale. Most of them, online and on TV, are about crimes that happened recently. Many have been about shootings or murders, some about the huge "UofL scandal" and one or two that I would count as newsworthy. While the other news organizations have also done this more than once, WDRB have posted things like this for their top stories a significant number of times. No, that doesn't mean that they don't post newsworthy things. It just means that their top stories, which I consider to be important, haven't been newsworthy.

Link to WDRB online: http://www.wdrb.com/

2nd Six Weeks: Response to Mattie's blog

     Mattie recently did a blog post about a story on WDRB, where they took up a lot of one of the blocks to to tell a story that wasn't actually a news story, it was more on human interest. It was about a man conquering many things to compete in the Ironman Triathlon. I had recently run into a story much like this one that I wrote about in one of my other blog posts, and I agree with Mattie that too much time and coverage is spent on inspiring stories. Especially for people who are watching/reading the news for actual news, not a story on how someone has overcome something in their life. They should have a separate time and place for human interest stories, other than during news blocks/categories.

Link to Mattie's story: http://datsomattie.blogspot.com/2015/10/response-to-man-conquers-addiction.html

2nd Six Weeks: Courier Journal

     For many weeks now, we have been following news organizations and writing down things like whether the stories are local, national, or international, and what category each story would go in. The organization I am following is the Courier Journal, which I always thought it would be a good place too see breaking news and good news stories. As I was reviewing the data that we have taken throughout these weeks, I have noticed that in the column for celebrity, fluff, and other, they have some of the biggest numbers between the groups, other than from WAVE. The lowest number in that column was a one, but in the same day, the online had eight. I was very disappointed when I noticed this.They should try to focus more on the news, than on celebrities and fluff.

Link to the Courier Journal's website: http://www.courier-journal.com

2nd Six Weeks: WLKY

     Most of the time, when I read stories from WLKY's page, they usually follow the ten elements and the seven yardsticks. But today I was checking the news in preparation for a current events quiz, when I saw a story called "Chef opens unique all-day breakfast restaurant in Saint Matthews." Before reading the article, I thought that maybe this story was newsworthy, but as I started to read the article, I realized I was wrong. When you read the article you will see that the article is about the chef's journey of getting into and out of dealing drugs. Yes, I'm very happy he turned his life around, but it is not really newsworthy and I think it should be under entertainment, instead of news.

Link to the news story : http://www.wlky.com/news/chef-opens-unique-allday-breakfast-restaurant-in-saint-matthews/36075170

2nd Six Weeks: TV Lecture

     The TV lecture really made me think about how it was before TVs. And how people probably knew their neighbors like friends and would go outside for many hours of the day to see other people or maybe just walk around. Now, most of the people I know only talk to maybe three of their neighbors and we stay indoors for most hours of the day. We don't just walk around and meet new people, and if we do it is usually for a specific reason. To me that is kind of sad,  wish we could go back to before TVs just to see what it was like, what if TVs were never even invented.

2nd Six weeks: parts of a newspaper

I thought the lecture on parts of a newspaper was boring. I am usually very interested in the lecture but this one didn't really catch my attention. Even thought it was boring, it was still something I really needed to know. Especially being in the J&C magnet, I will probably want to join newspaper or one blue wall, or something where I would need to know what this vocabulary meant. And if I didn't it would probably be very embarrassing.
    I didn't particularly enjoy this lecture, but I did like how every single part of the newspaper has to be well thought out and named, even if they are barely noticeable or the smallest thing on the page. It makes you thing about how long it actually takes to make a newspaper and how much thought goes into it.

Response to Nicole's blog

     I am responding to Nicole's post on magazines. I agree with her that if they didn't demassify then it would be a lot harder to find stories and other things that you are looking for. I also think that magazines wouldn't be as popular anymore if they stayed the same. Mostly because of new technology and the simple fact that you could just go on the internet and quickly search for what you need and get immediate stories on what you were looking for. But if magazines were still made to be for everyone than you would have to search through many pages of text that didn't matter to you at all. So while it is cool that there used to be only one magazine that could interest everyone, it is good that they do not continue to try and make them like that.

Here's a link to Nicole's post on magazines : http://meme-queen-trash-horder.blogspot.com/2015/09/magazines.html

Media Critique

     "Man Arrested After Allegedly Sniffing Feet at Florida International Library." That is the actual title of a story under the category of crime found on Fox News. The whole article was about a man going to a library and getting under a table to sniff a woman's feet, then getting arrested after fleeing from the cops. This is the perfect example of a journalist making the interesting important rather than the important interesting. This article is not newsworthy, it will not affect anyone for a long period of time except the man. Yet in the article they made everything seem very dramatic and important. They blew the whole story out of proportion by making it seem like a huge crime. Sometimes it is good to have stories like this because it shows what not to do while writing a news story.

Here's a link to the article : http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/09/16/man-arrested-after-allegedly-sniffing-feet-at-florida-international-library/?intcmp=hplnws

Binary Models

     Before this lecture, I would have no idea what a binary model was and if it had anything to do with journalism. So even with just that very small piece of information I think we can both agree that this was something that was needed to be talked about and have a lecture on it was important.
     I never     really thought about things like binary models, like how there are hot and cool mediums and elitist verses populist. These weren't exactly new to me because I experience things that go in these categories everyday, but the terms were all new. I really liked talking about them, especially the hot and cool mediums. I guess they interested me the most because I experience them more than the others. Like reading a book, books are hot mediums because they need you full attention. And something like listening to music or watching a movie you have seen a million times is a cool medium because it does not need your full attention. I think binary models are very important because they help us understand different types of mediums and it helps us categorize different types of journalism, even though most binary models have been scrunched together, like information and entertainment (infotainment), they are still very important to know about.

Newspapers

      In Mr. Miller's class we had a lecture on newspapers, which I didn't think I was going to enjoy, but it ended up being very interesting. I don't really read the newspaper and neither do many people in my family, so I didn't think much about them. That is until we talked about it in class. During our lecture we talked about how long newspapers have been around, why they are important, and the effects they had on the world and developing other technology.
     Our lecture on books was a lot like this one, but if you really look at the two inventions you would see that there are advantages of both. A big one that really caught my eye was the fact that newspapers were shareable. I never really thought about it much but newspapers are super cheap, so it is okay to leave it places and if you give it to someone else then you don't have to get it back. But with books, they were always super expensive, mostly because of how long it took to print them, and so they weren't as shareable, and you would want it back. Also books didn't really tell about news and there wasn't really just one book for everyone unlike the newspaper, which has many different columns and stories for many different people.
     So I think this lecture was very relevant and important to have, and now I think a lot differently about newspapers and it makes me appreciate them a lot more.

Response to Eli's blog

     I am responding to Eli's post on mass communication. I felt the exact same way after our lecture. I know parents and other adults always talk about how what you put on the Internet is no longer private and how everyone can see it, but I guess it never really sank in until the lecture. Now every time I post something I think of the affect it might have on other people, even though it is unlikely many people will see it. But I also like the fact that many people have a slight chance of seeing my post, it makes me feel more connected to other people around the world.

Here is a link to Eli's post on mass communication : http://smallblueblogger.blogspot.com/2015/09/mass-communication.html

Books.

     I am choosing to write about books because I love reading and I love talking about books. In this lecture, we did not only talk about books that you read for fun, mostly we talked about how the invention of books changed human life deeply and how much of an impact the invention had. To me it is kind of weird to think of a world without books, a lot of things wouldn't have been invented and a lot of people would most likely be illiterate. So having a lecture on books, to me, is a very important thing.
     I liked discussing how the invention of books helped our lives because I find it really cool that such a small thing could lead to so many other much bigger things and all we needed was something like a book to push us to create so much more. I also find it kind of crazy that just a book could have so much impact on our everyday life, now and forever. I guess what I am trying to say is that books are really important in many ways and our lives would be a lot different without them.

Mass Communication

     One of the first lectures that I was apart of in Mr. Miller's class was about mass communication. I really enjoyed this lecture, I found it very interesting and I liked talking about it. The most interesting part of it to me was that in daily life we experience mass communication everywhere and it has such a big impact on the world. You don't really notice how crazy it is that one person could send out a message from almost anywhere and it has the possibility to reach millions until you really think about it or have a discussion about it. I also really like mass communication because it makes you feel like you can make a difference in the world with just a click of a button. And this lecture made me realize that even though the process could be interrupted by many things, we are still very lucky that we have the technology that can make it all happen easily.