Are We Thumbing Our Way to Illiteracy?

Saturday afternoon we went to Glendale's oh-so-stylish Alex Theater for a screening of The Best Years of Our Lives.

Frequent text messaging causes young people to have stunted writing skills, according to a report from an educational commission in Ireland. According to a Yahoo! News story about the report, Irish school children are increasingly writing in "short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary."

And let's not even talk about punctuation.

This topic generated a lot of discussion among the MC101s, or at least those who weren't working their thumbs throughout the medianote.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #39

Best Viewed on a Sharp Television...

I'm hip deep in MC101 midterms. They will be returned to you as soon as possible.

Meantime, you're cordially invited to sit and watch cheddar cheese ripen. Cheddar Vision has become one of those silly Internet success stories, with more than one million hits from more than 100 countries.

We should have a good group tomorrow afternoon for our MC101 field trip to the Alex Theater. It beats sitting at home watching cheese ripen.

Wilfing Our Lives Away

After the violent and sad medianote that MC101 students have been talking about earlier this week, I thought it was time to present something that's a little more fun.

Enter "wilfing." Wilfing is short for "What Was I Looking For." It's the term for going onto the Internet looking for something very specific, but then having our attention wander until we find that a significant chunk of time has been spent on aimless web surfing.

And we still don't have the information that we went online to find. What was I looking for?

MWF classes only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #38

To Run or Not to Run

Had we not been on Spring Break, I would have done a medianote on the tragedy at Virginia Tech. So if this topic seems a little dated, it is.

NBC News had a rough week. They received what they call a "multimedia manifesto" from deranged mass killer Cho Seung-Hui. It was an angry, semicoherent rant/confession/suicide note. So NBC News was faced with a classic newsroom dilemma: do you run it, do you not run it, and if you do run it what parts do you show and what do you leave out?

As we now know, NBC's decision was to run selected portions on the air and to turn the materials over to federal authorities. And, predictably, they are taking a lot of heat for running anything at all. Here's the National Public Radio story on the situation.

On a much less controversial note, here's an NPR story about how the student newspaper at Virginia Tech is covering the situation that suddenly enveloped them.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #37

Imus and the F word

Don Imus is fired.

It is quite likely that the popular, controversial, risk-taking, crude (choose your own term) radio personality will never work in broadcasting again.

Or he might be back (on XM or Sirius, perhaps) by the end of the Spring Semester.

Imus and his now-infamous comment about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team brings a lot of societal and media issues to the surface.

•Is he a racist, or a sexist, or both, or neither?
•Is his unceremonious canning a defeat for uninhibited free speech, or is it a victory for the free speech of relatively powerless young women and their coach in responding to a powerful media figure?
•Do his comments represent a new low for our popular culture, or does his firing signal that our popular culture has finally touched bottom, and is now ready to bounce back up?
•And what about the advertisers who yanked their advertising over the incident? Are they heroes or cowards? Or was that just business?

There has been a lot of interesting commentary over this story during the past several days. I began today's discussion after playing an NPR News Analysis by the venerable Daniel Schorr.

MWF classes only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #36

Surfers Make Better Readers

We moseyed on over to the Autry Museum of the American West for a field trip on Tuesday afternoon. These MC101s chose alternate transportation.

According to a study by the Poynter Institute...

•Online readers read more of what they chose to read than readers of paper newspapers
•Nearly two-thirds of online readers read entire stories
•Newspaper readers looked at headlines and photos first, while online readers looked first at navigation bars and teasers
•Readers of both forms of news paid more attention to information in bulleted lists (like this one) than to traditional narrative news stories.

The results of Poynter's EyeTrack07 survey explodes the myth that readers of paper publications have greater attention spans than readers who get their news online.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #35

Snakes on a Set

Here's an idea from the We Are Smarter Than Me file...

If you recall, last summer the horror-comedic
thriller Snakes on a Plane was released only after a long process in which potential fans of the film were asked for suggestions about what scenes, plot twists, even expletives, they wanted to see in the film. The film's creative team was free to cherry-pick a few of the best ideas. Although the film was not a big hit at the box office, the pre-release buzz was much more than one would normally expect from what was, at its heart, a low-budget horror film.

The same general idea--get the viewers involved in the creative process--is being tried again, this time in televisionland. VH1 has decided to let viewers vote on which comedy sketches they would like to see more of. So, instead of guessing what the viewers want, let them just tell the TV executives what they want. It's a really simple, yet powerful, idea that is outlined in this a National Public Radio story.
Gabcast! Club MediaNote #34



TTh 1:15 class was preempted for the Autry field trip on April 10 and did not get this medianote


***LONG TAIL UPDATE I just ran across an interesting article on The Long Tail, one of the three possible topics for this semester's MC101 research paper. This looks at the theory from more of a business standpoint. It might be a good compliment to some of the more media-oriented sources that students are finding.

Googling for Votes

Does Google (and Google-owned YouTube) have a future in political advertising? Apparently Google management thinks so.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, Google is beginning to run political advertising workshops in which representatives of the tech company tell political operatives how to get their links ranked higher on the search engine and how to create a YouTube video that gets attention.

This comes against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential campaign and an increase in campaign funds spent for online communications.

MWF classes only

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #33

One Zell of a Deal

The Tribune Comapany, which (among other things) owns the Los Angeles Times and KTLA Channel 5, has apparently been purchased by Billionaire Sam Zell, who calls himself a "vulture investor" who specializes in distressed properties. His winning bid calls for him to put up less than 5% of the purchase price with his own money, which tells us

1. Tribune was eager to sell,
2. There weren't any great offers on the table,
3. Most big investors apparently aren't optimistic about the future of the newspapers and television stations that make up nearly all of the Tribune Company, and
4. Mr. Zell is going to be either really, really right or really, really wrong.

After listening to a National Public Radio story about the purchase, the discussion was opened up to questions that, for the most part, focused around the future of the Times.

Gabcast! Club MediaNote #32



***MORE ON ZELL Just for fun, here is a National Public Radio personality profile of new Tribune owner Sam Zell.