In Soviet Union, News Sites View You

Good Example: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ - I don’t know if this is a news website or not, but it’s pretty much a database of movie reviews, which appear in newspapers. So I guess it somewhat applies. The main purpose of the site is to gather as many reviews of a certain movie as it can and give it a percentage rating based on how favorable the reviews are. For example, Casino Royale has 163 positive reviews and 10 negative reviews out of the critics polled, giving it a 94 percent.

What I like most about the site is that the home page has a lot of information on it but it is well-organized and presented, so it’s not intimidating. It has new releases and the box office top-grossers for the week in the left margin, so people can identify what new movies are coming out and see what, on the whole, the critics are saying about it. The home page also has features written by the site’s staff and, while I don’t usually read them, it’s refreshing to know the site produces original material.

Once you’ve clicked onto a movie’s page, it shows excerpts from critics’ reviews and links to the full reviews. I like this because if you find a critic with a movie taste akin to yours, which is rare, you can easily follow his reviews through this feature. The movie pages also have a “cream of the crop” section that collects reviews from a selection of critics from major publications, so you can see how their opinions agree or differ from less prestigious critics.

Bad Example: http://www.buzzflash.com/ - This is a news collection database with a (severe) liberal slant. I’m not a frequenter of the site, but when I mentioned this assignment to a friend, this is the first thing that popped into his head in the “bad” file. And oh…my…God.

First of all, the home page hurts my eyes. It is a stark white background with an endless sea of links to stories, all in black bold type and underlined and with oranges and reds thrown in every now and then for good measure. It’s basically impossible to tell one story from the next without close inspection. Except the main headline, which screams at you from above the site’s logo, still in the same type but a lot bigger. The titles of the links more often than not have little asides that are just annoying. Here’s a taste: On a Yahoo News piece called, “Iran says it’s set to help U.S. on Iraq,” the BuzzFlash addition is “Ain’t That Ironic.” This doesn’t seem clever or cute to me, just distracting.

Once you’ve clicked onto a link, the interface is fine. But it’s so hard to get to that point that I can’t see anyone being able to interact with it for more than a short period of time.

If 59 percent of America's youth know the names of the Three Stooges, what percentage knows who Shemp is?

This essay presents the crux of an issue the class debated earlier in the year: Should news outlets be covering what their audiences want to read or what they think they should know?

I come down firmly on the side of the latter. There is a place for celebrity news and other topics that are considered “soft,” the topics in which a good portion of today’s readers are interested.

But that place is the inside pages or the entertainment section. It has no place side-by-side with the stories that are crucial for the readers’ understanding of their lives and communities.

I don’t want to say that news outlets know better than their readers what needs to be known, but in some cases, they do.

Cornog uses the example of the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal. He said that the Post received numerous letters from readers telling the paper to drop it because they didn’t want to hear about government corruption.

What sort of precedent would it have set if Ben Bradlee had told Woodward and Bernstein to leave the story be in an effort to court some more readers? A dangerous one. You might not want to think about a cancerous tumor, but I’m sure you’d want to know it was there.

And I’m glad that somebody finally called out the Redeye, because it makes me sick. This paper barely ever uses pieces by staff writers, opting instead to pull pieces from Tribune papers or wire sources and puts celebrity news (copious amounts of it) interspersed with a sprinkling of things that actually matter.

After North Korea tested its (possibly) nuclear weapon in October, the Redeye had a profile of Kim Jong Il titled “Lil Kim,” also the name of a female rapper (clarification intended for those not as hip as I). This is belittling a man that our president says is a big part of the Axis of Evil. This is what people want?

I’m part of the generation the Redeye caters to, the same generation Cornog says we need to be worried about. And I’m inclined to agree with his bleak assessment of our pettiness and apathy to civic duties.

He offers the peace and prosperity of our upbringings and contrasts it with the hardships of earlier generations to explain this, which I think is true to some extent. But if an entire generation of Americans can be this easily swayed by celebrity news and anything advertised as “extreme” (spelled “xtreme,” of course), then there’s probably something a little deeper going on.

Maybe we’re just damaged.

Horned Toads Can Shoot Blood Out of Their Eyes. This Has Nothing To Do With My Post, But It's Pretty Cool

The findings from these two sections of the Pew Research Center study are about as logical to me as the findings from the first two sections.

I think the one point that is most indicative of American society as a whole is the widening gap of viewers of Fox News and CNN along ideological lines.

It seems almost unfathomable to me that there was a time Republicans and Democrats watched Fox News at about the same frequency. But in the six years since this parity in 2000, the gap has jumped to 14 percent, with 34 percent of Republicans regularly watching compared with 20 percent of Democrats. It’s a wonder what being the first network to call the 2000 election for a Republican president will do for your stock with constituents of the Grand Old Party.

But apart from the effect of ballot confusion (or outright larceny, depending your view), this trend is a microcosm of a larger trend, which has been sweeping the nation since the beginning of Bush’s term(s), especially since Sept. 11 and the start of the Iraq war: the disappearance of the center in American politics.

It seems that politicians need to be radically left or radically right to get any recognition nowadays, and it’s this “you’re either with us or against us” mentality that makes me say a naughty word (I’ll give you a hint: it’s what comes out the back end of the sacred animal of Hinduism) when leaders on both sides now speak of bipartisan cooperation with a red White House and a blue Congress.

I’d like to think it’s going to be a piece of cake for everyone to take off their gloves and just get along, because that’s what is needed to truly better this country, but it’s not. The sniping of the last six years has been too nasty and the gulf is getting too wide. As Yo La Tengo says, “The damage is done.”

The findings of this study show me that not only are more people retreating further into their respective camps, but they’re content to stay there by patronizing the news as they want it to be told.

And by the way, since when has CNN been considered liberal? I’m asking this seriously, I don’t watch cable news.

I also found it interesting that while the gap of Fox News viewing has widened, the percent of Democrats tuning in has still increased. This is not so for CNN. I wonder if this is a sign of being a little more open-minded, or if it’s because more Democrats like a good dose of vitriol with their evening routines.

Fully 100 percent of the davidcmorrison.blogspot.com staff is tired of reading numbers on a computer screen

The Pew Research Center’s study quantified the very things teachers and articles have been telling me for a while: newspaper readership is declining rapidly, more people are relying on the internet for news and young people don’t care about news nearly as much as old people do (but we’re getting better…or the old people are getting worse).

And we like to play video games.

But wading through this sea of figures, I found three trends that encouraged me and reinforced my desire to become a newspaper journalist.

First is the finding that people are using the internet as a supplementary source rather than the only source. This seems to fly in the face of all the media commentators who are sounding the death knell of newspaper journalism (*cough* Dan Gillmor *cough*). This is only the case in the present and could change in future eras of flying cars and robots who can love, but for now, I’m claiming victory, Pyrrhic though it may be.

Second is the fact that newspapers are still the place people rely on mostly for local news. I think it’s important, in this age of the expanding scope and commoditization of news outlets, that readers can still have something to fall back on with a specific focus on the community. It might not be huge news that Bithlo, Fla., is getting a new town hall, but the people of Bithlo deserve to know it and deserve to have it treated with the gravity of any other story. And I’m glad to see people realize newspapers are still the best places to find this.

Lastly, people find reading the paper relaxing. When you sit down with a newspaper, you don’t have to deal with commercials, like you would on TV or the radio, or with flashing ads and banners trying to give you seizures, like on the internet. The thing that has always attracted me to newspaper journalism is the realization that readers are reading my stories because they want to and because they have the time to fully digest it. I don’t want them to be trolling the internet and “bump into” my stories, because then I’m being shoved into the five-second spot before the microwave rings and their Hot Pockets are ready.

The slow-paced feel that goes along with newspaper readership also gives room for more creativity and in-depth reporting, and the study also found that a good number the people who still read newspapers do so for this aspect. When the emphasis is placed on getting the news and getting it fast, it detracts from the creative process, the “writing” of “news writing.” If the emphasis is placed on speed rather than style, will there be room in the industry anymore for writers like Tom Wolfe, who turned their pieces into short novels? Or will the stories of the future all read like press releases? It’s comforting to know readers still appreciate newspaper reporting for the depth it can bring to a story.