Papers and words !

Let's dive in the knowledge pit eh ?

This week we looked at could be considered to be a dying art, newspapers and what conventions actually go into making one. Now if you think about it's hard, it could easily turn into print publication if you break down to it's root like the fact it covers news. To break it down I thought of the following points which could identify a newspaper.
1. Timing i.e does it come out everyday ?
2. Design ?, is it quite bland and on paper which is cheap and disposable ?
3. Wide target audience which is gained by covering any subjects like sport and world news ? (World news may not apply to a local paper unless theirs a local slant on the story)
4. A political bias perhaps ? (Like the Sun was with Labour but is now backing the Tories
)

These are just some general points below is more of an expansion of it:
Specific areas- Local (Like the Horncastle Target perhaps ?), National (The Sun), International (I can't think of many so far so I'll update that later, but some national papers like the Daily Mail cover international affairs)
Stakeholders- Work staff (like editors and journalists), advertisers who put ads in the paper, readers,owners and stakeholders who have money in the product, publishers and distributors.
Types of newspaper:
Red Top- These papers are like the News of the World which tend to have a political bias towards the Labour party. They have more focus on entertainment and may use simplistic shorter language to to get their stories across.
Tabloids- These tend to be (I'll use a harsh term) OK magazine but blander design and more formal. They always have a slant and tend to use the facts to put a point across, an example could be the Daily Express.
Broadsheets- These tend to be the more of the 'thinking mans' paper and tend to focus on hard news like politics and serious going on's in the world. An example would be the Times. They tend to supplement full and this could reflect their target audience who more disposable income to pursue subjects like theatre going and purchasing books to read.
Local Weeklies- These work on geodemographical areas. I.e a local paper will cover specific area like a set to of towns for instance. Again like the Horncastle target which covers Horncastle, Woodhall Spa and Conningsby.
Student/council newspapers: Like the super amazing Linc which comes out on a irregular basis and such council ones like the Lincoln county produced one which has been considered heavily biased towards the council. So this purposes the question are they really newspapers, in the case of Student newspapers I would say yes since they cover a wide range of events albeit most have a student slant. Council 'newspapers' however I would say are to just bias to be newspapers and even to an extent cheap P/R for the Council.
Specific subjects- So super cool examples of these would be the Financial times which as the name suggests as slanted quite towards the world of Finance, another example would be internal publications like the one produced for Royal mail telling workers what's going in the company. However for internal publications I would say their merely newsletters considering the biased and uneasy agenda they possess.

Now since I've finished blowing your mind it's time to reveal the agenda for next week, for those hardcore fans out their may know a few weeks ago I had to a presentation on a local community radio station. This time I have to do a local paper which has already been chosen for us, the Horncastle Target, and of course the sequel twist is I'm working in a group. Me and my group have split our workload between us and I'm looking forward to working with him it should be a memorable memory of sorts. So far my research has gone OK, not much of it was on the Internet and involved not using it (information not on the Internet ?, madness) so I've had to go through the paper itself which was quite abundant with relevant information and utilise Facebook to spy on editors profiles to obtain other bits.

The history of history books

This week we were treated to the history of the printing press in our generally mind blowing lecture (got the phrase out the way early).

This week we learnt how the progression of the storing and of the written word played a key part in changing the nature of the social classes and the mindset of your average human being. Specifically I’m referring to how the introduction of a mass printing press lead to the production of various scientific publications from radical voices of the time like Copernicus and Galileo were able to reach the masses which lead people to develop theories and beliefs. An example of this would be how Galileo's theories on the galaxy could have lead people to one get a better education then the one they have currently but also change their beliefs contradicting the one the church had represented.

Also in terms of the effects it had on class was the construction of a whole new one during the 17th century known as the Bourgeoisie which could have been considered to be the producers and key consumers of books and publications at the time and also bought at change to the countries info structure by allowing someone of no nobility of heritage possess some power.

Two key bits I have learnt however:
1. Ideas are based on ideas. To sum this up in less vague modern artish manner I’ve found for example printing guru Elizabeth Eisenstein presented various ideas and research on the printing press possibly influenced further publications and served as a platform for information.
2. The evolution of print is fragile and the written word is evolving. From going from cave paintings and simplistic illustrations utilised by the Church to demonstrate extracts from the Bible to manuscripts of key religious texts, printing presses and finally the computer. The written word is evolving even now through blogging (blogging on a blog whilst blogging?) and (something I need to do an account for) Twitter, the real questions is what's next for the word and questions marks?

My first ever serious journalism assingment ?

So here it is Friday night, one of the seven nights a week students use to go and drink and take residence in town centres whilst at a level of drinking of tipsy or way above. Usually I may be out their joining them to celebrate the end the week but tonight it's sober and unsocial.

On my first ever serious journalism assignment for website the Lincolnite I've been sent out with the Street Pastors, a church based organisation helping those around the town at night from ten till late, as I sit waiting for half nine and I have to suit up and brave the November weather I feel the nerves jangling and I hope it's not what I cooked earlier. Just last night I had bad experience in the Lincoln whilst walking past Chicken cottage to guy decided to start on me and a group mostly female friends because two of us were running and it exceeded the 'speed limit', fortunately no one was hurt but everyone was quite shaken and disturbed. I'm just apprehensive of what will meet tonight as this time I wont be bumping into trouble by sheer chance were probably going to be looking for it to give aid. I just hope tonight is safe as it will be interesting and it may be nice to be up at three in the morning and sober. Either way this should be an eye opening night.

Not more sequel puns if fifthquelly getting annoying

So let’s dive in again shall we?, this week we were treated to the appearance of guest lecturer who was none other then Radio lecturer and Lincoln universities community radio station manager Andrew David.

What Andrew did was to shake the whole guest lecture set up, which can be compared to adding cheese to a salad, fresh and a little more flavour. He asked to present our questions in lines with the 6W’s about Siren FM. So here’s what we learnt:

1. Started out as an online radio station broadcasting from two till six
2. Lecturers, students and the public can volunteer and the station runs schemes to get those less fortunate on the air.
3. Caters to an audience of nine to twenty five, however depending on the time it could change.
4. The studio was funded by the University.

So here’s what should be a consistent feature for each week of what shocked me. This week my shock came to me that the actual difference between mainstream and community radio stations is that community stations are looking for those niches, shows on Siren like motor mechanics or Roller derby would never get onto Radio 1 unless they were a wacky feature. As Andrew David said he’s looking for what’s in-between our ears (not hair) to make a show special which could be stripped down to those to super employable words creativity and orginiality, technologies gotten to that point it can create your bog standard music show, what makes it special is the bits in between the songs, the interviews, the features and the guests all of these are so key to making a show which would catch a listeners ear. I also found that mainstream radio is missing a serious niche, the 9 to 25 years olds and those with specialist hobbies like Jazz and projector noises, if the BBC saw these holes and dedicated little less time to over hyped DJ’s and more time to their audience figures should surely shot up quicker then Mentos in a coke bottle.

Will I ever become the master of communication ?

So this week after we did our presentations we tackled the subject of mass media in much more detail. After our previous lecture with taught about the wide range of services the BBC offers we moved on to how it and other terrestrial channels like Channel 4 came about. Essentially channels like ITV and Channel 4 were born for the simple desire of more choices from the neglected audiences strangely thanks to report done every ten years from the BBC. If you think about it seems to be quite true. Overall the BBC's content has always been deemed quite safe and most entertainment products to have moral message encoded somewhere, like Waterloo road demonstrating the perils facing teens in these so called strange times. Now compare it to something like Channel 4 (which is strangely funded via adverts and interests groups) which produces the insanely funny Intbetweeners which displays the more awkward and if done in a more serious light like Skins and controversial side of being a spotty faced teen it would never make it on to BBC thanks to it's Government influence of purity. On a side note it didn't surprise me that Channel 5 started out as a low budget alternative thanks to the amount of US import shows and pretty dull documentaries, but it did surprise me that they didn't have to produce any regional programming.

So onto what else I learnt today was again that recurring theme of how helpful technology like plans after World War 2 were used for tourism that the radio boom was created thanks to the Military using Marconi to create Morse codes for ships to be then commercialised and lead to the wireless radio, just another example of histories leap from military technology to commercial application.

So now I’ll produce my final shock. Looking at radio control models in other countries we found this:
UK radio: Public service (not such a shock)
US radio: Commercial interests (not surprising from a wealthy country)
Russian radio: Government controlled (This really shocked me, because the last time I checked Russia was a democracy and I though controlling media outlets to such a puppetry degree would be surely in breach of some kind of International law. It's not like the BBC who've only had the government control their content during Thatcher’s reign when their anti Thatcher programming was considered un-British, but even then they were given space to brief and report the facts.)

Some quite useful Tulip FM trivia

Hey their followers and non followers here’s my blog post for the week. As you may know or for may not know (so many positives and negatives) I’ve been putting together my presentation on a local radio or TV station. I choose to do a radio station and selected Tulip Fm from my home town of Spalding.

On my course of research I picked up a few facts which may not be relevant to my presentation to so I’ll pop them down below for the world to read or ignore as another ramble blog.

1. I’ve had at least 4 friends working as volunteers from the station, some got their chance by a bizarre twist of fate in which they were given a chance to work for the station in it’s years prior to going full time after they wrote poems about onions. Their original prize was going to be what must have been planed to be a super interesting tour of the local council offices in all the grey and dull glory. However that fell through so the back up prize was a tour of the radio studios and then a chance to work on the station.
2. They have the facilities for live bands and are toying with the idea of apparently doing a local Radio 1 live lounge style show, just without Fern Cotton sucking up to bands that were around before she was born.
3. I thought it was all funded privately by the station manager until I checked their website to find that they have various sponsors and advertising deals with local companies around Spalding thus making them a commercial radio station.
4. I also found out that Radio 1 DJ Greg James mentioned the station during his show many times thus boosting it’s popularity.