Reinventing Newspaper Analysis

Reinventing Newspapers Analysis Chapter 8 deals with the newspaper industry. But just about every other chapter we have read so far has also covered topics that pertain to changes and challenges facing the newspaper industry, including fragmenting audiences, people’s expectation for new information 24 hours a day, heavy use of digital devices like tablets and smart phones, and the difficulty content providers have being profitable in this new world.

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This paper allows you to draw on all that you have learned so far to consider how well newspapers are succeeding in evolving in modern times. To complete this assignment, you must first spend about a week familiarizing yourself with a newspaper, including both the print and online editions. Examples of papers you could choose include the St Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, and USA Today. However, if you have another daily newspaper you prefer, perhaps from a city you grew up in or where you follow a sports team, you may choose that one. It must be a mainstream, daily newspaper. A week or more before the paper is due, examine your newspaper’s website for ways that it is trying to interact with audiences. Look for ways in which it is encouraging audiences to receive and contribute to the site’s content as well as to interact with each other around its content. For example, there may be blogs, RSS or Twitter feeds, comment sections, mobile apps, or Facebook pages. Note which features are free and which are behind a paywall. Spend a week using the features and tools that are accessible to you. Don’t skip over this part; the more you actually carry out a hands-on examination of these techniques, the more you will have to say when it comes to writing your paper. Review at least one edition of the print edition. (Note: copies of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, and USA Today are available free on campus to students.) Consider how the experience of reading the print edition differs from the experience of reading an online edition. Then, write an approximately 4-page paper about your experience. You should apply the principles and tools of media literacy in your analysis. Specifically, your paper should do the following: ▪Include a brief introduction that previews your main points. ▪ Describe what features (e.g., a blog, an RSS feed) your newspaper offered its audiences online and which ones you experimented withDescribe the institutional purpose of these features. Why do you think each feature is being offered? That is, what do you think the newspaper company is hoping to gain or achieve by offering these features that they couldn’t achieve with a printed edition? What problem or issue is it intended to address? Are they all targeted to the same audience, and if not, which audience is each one targeted to? ▪ Describe the motivations of you and other target audiences in relation to news. That is, what are you and other potential users of news sites seeking from their news sources? What is most likely to motivate you to get news from this particular paper? ▪ Describe how well the newspaper’s features gratify those motivations. For example, to what extent did these efforts allow you to get closer to the news you want? To what extent did they extend your understanding of various sorts of news? Did the blogs or chat areas make you want to come back to the site more than you would if you hadn’t connected with them? In general, how successful were these features in creating bonds between you and the newspaper? ▪ Provide an evaluation of how successful you think these features are or will be in achieving financial success for the newspaper industry, which is struggling. In addition, how successful do you think these features are or will be in achieving the social function of the newspaper? That is, do you think they benefit the people and community in which the newspaper operates? ▪ Apply the concepts and theories covered in class to your analysis, and back up your points with details. Remember, there should be a point to what you are saying. Don’t tell us the newspaper allows reader comments or that there is a conversation area in the recipe section without telling us why that matters or what that means. Remember, the goal is to demonstrate what you have learned about the media in the 21st century and the newspaper industry specifically. ▪Make reference to specific class concepts, referring to the book and using proper APA citation style to do so. This includes attributing direct quotes to the book in the text of your paper, attributing main ideas – even if they are not direct quotes – to the book in the text of your paper, and including the textbook in a reference or ‘works cited’ list. Instructions on how to do this are found in the “Standards for Acceptable Submission” document on the course website. ▪ Keep an academic tone throughout the paperThe paper should have a beginning (the introduction), a middle (the analysis), and an end (the evaluation or conclusion). It should not be a collection of random thoughts or observations. Your grade will be based on two basic things. About half of your paper grade is based on how you present your ideas. Since you are a college student, we expect you to be able to communicate what you mean clearly and to use proper spelling and grammar. We also expect you to format your paper and cite your sources in a specific way. While you may make an error or two doing so, if you don’t even try, or use a format other than the one we ask for, you are letting us know you do not care about our expectations or your grade. Finally, we expect you to organize your ideas in a coherent way. You shouldn’t repeat yourself unnecessarily or skip around from topic to topic. Each paragraph should be designed to communicate a specific point. Furthermore, the paragraphs should be should be presented in a logical order and transition sentences should be used to indicate how they relate to each other. Additionally, because this is your second paper and we provided substantial feedback on your first paper, we will be grading this paper harder than the first one. We would like to think you learned from our grading the first time around. If you make the same errors again, despite the time we took to point them out to you, you will be penalized for them more harshly this time. The rest of the grade is based on the ideas that you present. Specifically, it will be based on the depth of the understanding you show of class concepts pertaining to the newspaper industry and trends in media. A strong paper will demonstrate to the reader that you have reviewed and understand the concepts about the media that are presented in the readings and lectures. It will also demonstrate that you can do more than accurately repeat back what you’ve read or heard. It will show that you can think for yourself and use the concepts to analyze the techniques used by the newspaper you examined. This paper should be approximately four pages long, not including the cover page and the works cited list. If you need it to be a little longer to make your points, that is fine. It should not be significantly shorter. Skipping lines between paragraphs, having giant margins, or putting your title on every page are obvious and tacky ways of demonstrating you don’t have anything to say, and should be avoided. Your work should meet the communication department’s “Standards for Acceptable Submission” document, which is available on the class webpage. Among other things, these standards require all papers to have a cover page, to be typed in 10 or 12-point font, and to have one-inch margins. All papers should be carefully spell-checked and proofread. This assignment should be your own work. Ideas or language from sources (including the textbook) should be cited properly. This means that direct quotes should be indicated through the use of quotation marks or block quotesAll sources should be acknowledged within the text of the paper as well as within a works-cited page at the end of the paper. Papers that contain ideas or prose that are borrowed from other material without proper acknowledgment do not meet the standards for acceptable submission and will receive a zero. Violation of these standards can also constitute an act of academic dishonesty. In these cases, a written report of the incident will be forwarded to the Office of Academic Affairs, which can pursue further action.