Readings 1

Just got done with my readings this week, not too bad.

One of the things I read was The Missouri Group Book I have, chapters 7 & 8. The first chapter dealt with the inverted pyramid which I know fairly well, but it was a good refresher. The examples help a lot, cuz i usually like to ramble and it drills the point about being clear and consise. The second chapter was a little more up my alley since it talked about being able to add your own identity to stories and make it more readable and more appealing to the readers. I like doing TV so the writing aspect is obviously important and needs a good flow to keep viewers inticed. Most of the examples are from newspapers or online, but so far this book is definitely helping.

The other reading assignment was from the website stateofthemedia.org. This article assessed in great detail the direction that our news media is going in. According to many sources such as the Poynter Institute for media, newspapers (the objects) are losing sales at a rapid rate, but newspapers (the companies) in general are generating money through new and extensive online programs. Because space on the internet is infinite, the journalism aspects of coverage and detail are utilized better online, and the "news hole" could be considered a thing of the past. Papers [like the New York Time and Washington Post] and news companies [like CBS and NBC] have essentially duplicated their normal stories and turned them into webpages accessible to everyone, usually for a small subscription fee. Also, new online-only news sources rival the big corporations in an attempt to garner the new generation of investigators and media savvy readers into the ever-growing World Wide Web.

( To view this artcile, see http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/narrative_newspapers_intro.asp?cat=1&media=2 )

The article primarily addresses the question as to whether newspapers were a dying medium, but because companies can still generate money, I agree with the article in saying papers will be just fine. Divisions may be changing, office space may be cut, and subsciption may be lower, but there's no way newspapers are leaving the public media's attention.