YEAR 2 BROADCAST JOURNALISM | STAN ARMIT
Creating a News Outlet
Active Audiences
An Active audience is an audience that actively engages with text and information. They do not believe everything they see and will do their own research to find the truth. They develop their own interpretation of a media product based on their life experiences, education, family and cultural influences.
Passive Audiences
Passive audiences do not actively engage with text and information. They believe most things they see or hear from news outlets nor do they question the message being sent to them by the media. Therefore accepting the message in the way the media outlet would like them to.
Theories
Cultivation Theory.
Cultivation theory is a theory created by George Gerbner in the 1960’s. the theory consists of research he carried out about how violence on television and programming effects people. The theory suggests that 80% of prime-time television and programming included violent content, the theory is sociological and communications framework which suggests long-term exposure to media. This shapes how the consumers of media perceive the world as well as conduct themselves in real life. There are two types of viewers in television, heavy viewers and light viewers. Being a heavy viewer means you watch television for 4+ hours a day. Here are some assumptions of the type of person a heavy viewer is:
It is predicted that a heavy viewer would perceive the world as a more dangerous place because of their high exposure to violent content.
By watching TV, different researchers have claimed that a person becomes: more materialistic, racist or violent.
Indifferent about environmental issues, unaware of what is reality and what is TV.
There are cracks to the theory as critics have claimed Gerbner didn’t take into account on how viewers already felt before becoming a viewer, or that a person’s demographic may have an affect on how they feel about the world. An example of this theory coming true is in 2004 a student named Michael Hernandez stabbed his classmate and he was inspired to do so by the famous movies ‘Silence of the lambs’ and ‘American Psycho’.
The positives of this theory are that is relevant as it has been proved multiple times with people taking inspiration from television to complete horrible crimes and murders. The negatives are that he didn’t take into account how people felt before becoming a heavy viewer to see if there were any mental issues before they watched television.
My overall thoughts on the theory are that is that I do not completely believe in it as millions of people watch television and play video games and these crimes committed because of them are extremely rare.
Representation in media theory.
The 1997 video by Stuart Hall is most sited
Representation is how the media represents and deals with things such as gender, society, class, places, objects, or events
It’s a powerful idea that allows that allows audience to influence the views of audiences
The text won’t tell you what to think, but instead leave hints that help the audience get to a preferred conclusion
The encoder – also knows as the author or content creator.
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Construction – editing photos, video, audio in a way to send a clear message to the audience
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Mediation – a script is written in a way to purposefully represent a certain person, or group of people.
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Selection – this is where a news outlet will pick out information that they want you to know. This may also include bending fact/stats/information.
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Anchorage – this is where certain words are chosen to provide a certain meaning and feeling (often used in headlines and slogans)
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Stereotypes – encoders will use stereotypes to represent a group of people (often used to represent a group of people (think shows such as little Britain)
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Ideology – these are often the views of people who work or own the media companies. They use their production as a vehicle for their views
The audience receives the message that has been purposely constructed.
Media Dependency Theory
(Sandra Ball – Rokeach and Melvin Defleur)
1976
The theory is heavily based on the ‘use of gratification’ theory.
The theory suggests that the more a person becomes dependant on the media to fulfil their needsw, the media will have so much more power over the person.
This in term makes it easier for encoders to set the agenda.
Society –(left and right arrow)- the encoder
(down arrow)
Audience
(down arrow)
The Knowledge Gap Theory
Philip. J Tichenor, George A. Donohue and Clarice. N Olien
The theory was suggested by the above professors in 1970
They say some parts of society will gain more knowledge and understanding than the lower-economic parts of the population
If this theory is correct, it means people who operate in a higher class will receive more detailed understanding of what is happening of what is happening – simply because they can access it
If the way we get news is not made equal, that gap will only get bigger.
The encoder
Their information
Person 1: this person lives in London and earns a very good wage as a banker. This means they can receive more news and information
Person 2: This person earns an average wage as a builder so can receive some of the same news person 1 gets
Person 3: this person doesn’t have a job. They live in a one bedroom therefore cannot receive the same information as person 1 and 2.
What is the theory?
The ‘Representation in media theory’ was created by Stuart Hall in 1997. It originated from a video created by Stuart Hall.
This theory suggests how media represents and deals with things such as gender, society, class, places, objects, or events.
Idea One
Idea Two
These show what we worked on as a team to come up with different things to report on and cover for our outlet, we came to the decision to specialise in sport, entertainment and celebrity gossip.
Our Final Idea:
Our idea is to create a national news outlet which covers Britain’s biggest sports, entertainment and gossip stories. We chose to make a national outlet as we have some stories in mind that aren’t relevant to the local area. For example, we are aiming to write film reviews and cover celebrity gossip, neither of which are relevant to Yorkshire.
We hope to achieve the highest grade possible from this project and we are confident this is a realistic possibility. We also hope to create an outlet that is both professional looking and appealing to our target audience of 16-24 year olds.
Our idea is relevant in today’s climate as we are covering new, ever-changing stories from across the nation. There are already hundreds of national news outlets in existence but we aim to make ours unique but equally as entertaining to the younger generation.
Throughout the next few weeks, we will work as a team to produce consistent content to an exceptionally high standard. Also, as the leader of the group, it is my job to ensure that each member of the team are playing their part in making Breathe Britain a success.
Our idea is challenging and ambitious as none of us have ever created a news outlet before. Additionally, national news is something not many of us have delved into due to most of us opting to cover interesting localised stores.
We will look at the verified and established news outlets of the world to obtain our information. These will include the likes of BBC News, ITV News and Sky News. Once we have gathered the news, we will add our own spin on it and create an entertaining product.
Our ideal target audience is those aged 16-24 and living in the UK as we believe these people will be most interesting in engaging with our content. However, this is only a recommendation and anyone can enjoy our content if they would like to.
Overall, we are extremely confident that our news outlet will be a success and we are excited to get going and begin producing our amazing content.
Three targets we hope to achieve...
Examples of our Products.
Health in Sports. - TV News Report
Top 5 Best World Cup Songs. - Social Media Video
Our links.
Updated Statement Of Intent
Presentation Powerpoint - The Loop
Evaluation
For our Unit 10 Broadcast Journalism project, me and 5 of my other classmates teamed up to create a national news outlet. The topics on which we decided we wanted to focus (each of our strongest) were; sports, entertainment and lifestyle. We wanted to do this because it sparks interest from a lot of people. We went for a sharp, modern design of branding for our multiple social media accounts which consisted of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our target audience was 16–19 year-olds – so basically college students.
We immediately started off this project by creating an exciting name ‘The Loop’ which refers to the term ‘in the loop’ that is often used to describe being caught up with news and everything going on. We then made our branding, which as I said earlier we wanted to keep sharp and modern whilst also keeping it as professional as possible. One of my peers Alex took the role of group leader after all of the group decided on it as he is reliable and also the most confident and experienced in this sector. He also was the admin for our social media. The social media platforms I mentioned earlier, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were the content hubs for our brand. We kept up with 3 posts daily and even extra when we made things like TV Packages or Social Media Videos. My job was to create content for The Loop, so I made multiple high-quality, industry standard Social Media Videos on my strongest topic, sport, and helped edit TV Packages.
Even though I was quite happy with what we’d achieved, we had some bumps along the way; which is inevitable when working as a group of 6. For example, sometimes it felt as though some team members weren’t quite pulling their weight for the group which meant they weren’t giving us the content they were producing on time, because they were spending their time chatting to friends or being absent at college, which is completely out of my hands. I had to have a week off during this project because I came down with a terrible sickness bug and was bed ridden all week, it was tough. I felt like I was letting my group down and not helping but it came to my senses there really was nothing I can do, and I hope and think they know that it was not my decision to have this time off.
After all of this, I still believe our team was brilliant at what they did and the end product and presentation went fantastically. The amount of content we were pushing out shocked the people that came to watch our presentation and seamed blown away by how much we had published, which was nice to see our hard work had paid off. Our news outlet was deemed best of our class (1st out of 3 groups). This was determined by the people that came to watch our presentations. We set out to create a professional news outlet that was inspired by companies such as LadBible, SportBible and UniLad, and I think we did just that, which definitely put a smile on my face at the end of this project.