As Seen On Wikipedia

Today's medianote is about the growing popularity of Internet brands in the global marketplace. A Yahoo! News story was the starting point for this medianote. I expanded on this story to talk a little about how these very new companies (I have socks older than MySpace) have captured huge audiences very quickly, and at much less cost. For example, while it is unknowable when (if ever) YouTube will be profitable, the size of the audience that YouTube draws has the potential to be tremendously valuable.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #13

Hey, You Oughta Be on Drugs!

I guess there really is such a thing as a happy pill.

Today's medianote comes from a National Public Radio story about the advertising of perscription drugs on television. The NPR story targeted ads that, while not factually incorrect, include scenes that depict some perscription drugs as happy pills that solve life's problems. As one student pointed out, if you've ever been sad or anxious, you're a candidate for physician-assisted self-medication.

This medianote generated a surprisingly strong discussion from the class.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #12



***DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME Two South Korean men, ages 26 and 20, have been arrested for sending out more than 1.6 billion spam messages. Annoying behavior to be sure (I think I got about half of those emails), but a prime example of how the Internet empowers individuals.

Your Name Here, Ph.D., PSP

Maybe there's more to computer games than shooting people and blowing things up. A recent Yahoo! News story quotes a Wisconsin professor who believes that schools should increasingly turn to video games as an engaging and mentally-stimulating teaching tool. He believes that game-based instruction will help to develop the type of innovative, quick-thinking workers that the New Economy needs.

Some MC101s were a little dubious about this. One student pointed out that encouraging students to play video games could fuel addictions, most likely to games without educational content. Another student said that games with any real educational content will simply be shunned by young people. A third student said that video games usually command total concentration and therefore aren't very good at teaching multitasking.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #11

voteforme.com

Supplemental Instruction Leader Mike Arvizu leads these MC101 students through Midterm study questions.

Presidential politics have finally entered the dotcom world.

This year's candidate websites are more sophisticated than ever. During Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's webcast, there was a simultaneous appeal for campaign contributions and a running tally of how much had been given. John Edwards has a website big enough to wander around for days.

The MC101s listened to a National Public Radio story that discussed how these websites are being used to promote the candidates and avoid reporters with tough questions. Also, there was some discussion about what to expect as even more Internet tools are turned into campaign tools.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #10

Uncertain Times

MC101s toured the Times on Jan. 12. We are in the newspaper's ressearch library. Darrell Kunitomi is showing us the massive file of pre-1985 newspaper clippings.

To most longtime Los Angeles residents, the L.A. Times seems about as permanent and integral to the city as City Hall. It's just there, and it has sort of been assumed that it will always be there.

Well, that sense of certainty changed a few years ago when the Chandler family, publishers of the Times for 120 years, sold out to the Tribune Company of Chicago. It didn't quite feel like City Hall had fallen under the occupation of a foreign government hostile to our ways (like Iran or San Francisco), but sort of.

Tribune is a very bottom-line, profit-driven outfit. This is not to say the Chandlers ran the paper as a charitable trust, but somehow under their ownership (or at least the last 40 years of it) the paper hit a reasonable balance between profit and civic responsibility.

However, the Chandlers never had to deal with a newspaper industry with a future as uncertain as the one faced today. With low staff morale low, unhappy stockholders, an aging readership and declining advertising revenues, the Tribune Company has invited bids for a controlling interest in the company. Among the known bidders are two Los Angeles billionaires and the Chandler Family Trust.

These are uncertain times at the Times, as this National Public Radio Story points out.

***CLASSROOM COMPUTER FIXED We've finally got NPR stories playing on the new classroom computer. This should make the madianotes a little more compelling than they've been over the last week or so.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #9

Selling Music in a World of Free Media

On Saturday, two dozen MC101s (and one intrepid blogger) went on the Los Angeles Conservancy's Broadway Theater Tour. We saw theaters that have been converted into various unlikely things, including the consumer electronics store pictured here.

Once upon a time, students drank out of drinking fountains. It was a point of pride to know which drinking fountain had the highest spout and coldest water. And if the water from a fountain tasted like rust, well, we just avoided it.

Somewhere along the line, young people, old people and pretty much everyone else turned away from the free water in drinking fountains and instead bought bottled water. Today, the drinking fountains at Glendale College and elsewhere are rarely used.

I think about that when I think about the problems the recording industry is having with trying to sell music in a world where young people are used to downloading it for free. Today's medianote is from a Yahoo! News story about the ideas that recording industry executives have about getting young people to pay for music once more.

How hard can it be to sell recorded music to a group of people who are willing to buy water?

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #8

Wonder What The Finns Are Watching Tonight?

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have had a pretty remarkable career as Internet entrepreneurs. Skype and Kazaa are both startups of theirs. EBay bought the former for $2.5 billion in 2005, so they have enough seed money to try another big online idea.

And so they have. Joost is an Internet television startup that is intended to bring global programming to anyone with broadband access.

But what kind of programming would people watch on a worldwide basis? One MC101 suggested a reality show where the participants are from different countries, including some that don't get along with one another.

Starting point for this medianote was a Yahoo! News article.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #7

This Medianote Is PG (Pretty Good)

A recent National Public Radio story discussed changes in the movie ratings system that dates back to 1968. here are several things to think about in regard to the ratings...

1. They are designed to regulate the audience, rather than the film, although regulating the audience has much the same effect.

2. Movie ratings are not government censorship; the ratings system comes from inside the movie industry.

3. Independent and other smaller film makers believe the rating process is very political and biased toward big names and major studios.

4. The system was designed at a time when new movies were in theaters and old movies were on television; VHS tapes, DVDs, video stores, pay per view, and Internet downloads didn't exist yet.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #6



***We are going to have a double group for our tour of the Broadway Theater District with the Los Angeles Conservancy on Saturday. Let's hope for good weather. This is, after all, a walking tour. Here's what happened on our last Broadway Theater Tour back in July.

How to Dress (or Drive) Like a TV Star

Point. Click. spend $88,000. thanks to Seen On, you can buy a Maserati like the one seen in "Desperate Housewives."

Today's medianote comes from a Los Angeles Times article about seenon.com, a web site where television viewers can buy clothes, furniture and other things big and small that are depicted on popular television shows. As an example, the article says you can go to the SeenOn web site to buy the black wool coat worn by Dr. Burke in "Grey's Anatomy" or the Maserati driven by Gabrielle Solis in "Desperate Housewives."

On media expert said it creates the possibility that TV could become "one giant catalog." The MC101s did an excellent job discussing this possible trend.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #5

Comedian or Comedic Actor?

Borat is a mass comm teacher's dream. Every once in a while something comes along in the mass media that is truly different and gets us thinking about the nature of entertainment, comedy, fact versus fiction, bigotry, and damage control.

Today's medianote is based on a Los Angeles Times interview with Sacha Baron Cohen, AKA Borat. Times Entertainment Reporter Patrick Goldstein pointed out that by immersing himself into the Borat character, Mr. Cohen has been able to protect himself from the sometimes career-ruining fallout faced by celebrities that say or do something hateful. After all, Borat's anti-Semetic views don't sound much different than what one might hear out of a drunken Mel Gibson.

The MC101s had some very interesting things to say on this topic. I found myself thinking that Mr. Cohen was able to get away with saying the things he said because audiences viewed him as a comedic actor playing a part in a movie. But if the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen had said some of these same things as a guest on "The Tonight Show" he would come under much more criticism.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #4

True Fiction

A friend of mine went out on a date with a rather odd young woman some years ago. At some point in the evening, they were in a bookstore having a discussion about this novel or that. It became increasingly apparent to my friend that his date wasn't quite clear about what a novel was. Finally, she gestured toward the fiction section and said incredulously, "You're telling me that nothing in these books is true?"

In one of those pre-Borat sort of moments, my friend never did figure out if his date was putting him on or not.

But movies and other mass media are sometimes a little like this situation where where it is difficult to figure out what's real and what isn't. An article in the Calendar Section of the Los Angeles Times discussed reaction to the current Hillary Swank film "Freedom Writers" in Long Beach, where the film was set. Quite a few locals believe that the community and one of its public high schools are portrayed unfairly and inaccurately.

So how accurate does a film based on a real situation have to be? Perhaps that is a question best left to lawyers. We weighed in on the related ethical question: How accurate should such a film be?

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #3

Tom and His Friends Are Here to Stay

Our first MC101 field trip of the Winter Intersession went well. We had 36 MC101s and guest turn out for this field trip at the Autry National Center. Here are the early arrivals.

Tuesday's Medianote, the first of the Winter Intersession, comes from a Reuters article about the use of social networking sites by U.S. teenagers. In short, a survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that social networking sites (especially MySpace) are wildly popular among youths aged 12-17, that many of them are careful about restricting access to their profiles, and that boys are more likely to go online to flirt while girls are more likely to go on line to maintain contact with friends.

We had a good discussion about these results.

***AUDIO IS READY (Maybe) I'm having some trouble making my audio post to Gabcast. I think I have a good link to it below.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #2

Welcome to the Winter 2007 Intersession

Thought I would post this before the session begins and I move on to other things...

The GCC Library is offering a information competency workshops during the upcoming Winter session. I allow extra attendance credit to MC101 students who go to these workshops during the winter session. You can sign up for these workshops at the dedicated computers at the reference desk in the library.

Descriptions of the workshops are described here and the workshop schedule is here. Paper copies of the schedule are available in the library.