A Welcome from the Author

Welcome to the companion website for the third edition of Understanding the Media, which contains a number of important features that will assist both student readers and their instructors.

Divided into two sets of resources, the companion website provides you with additional materials which are intended to complement the print edition of Understanding The Media¸ Third Edition. These supplementary materials are best used sequentially and will help students and their instructors to engage further with sometimes complex issues and debates in creative ways. The carefully selected materials are intended to deepen student knowledge and serve as an exciting starting point in developing a critical gaze concerning the media.

In the Student Resources you will find a toolkit comprising practical exercises. I have devised and applied these exercises in my own teaching. Pertinent online readings from SAGE Journals Online as well as key discussion points are also provided. Where relevant, there are additional case-studies and guidance in the useful web-links and further reading sections. These are intended as signposts to guide you in how you might go further in your quest to understand the media more critically. The materials will help you to compare and contrast evidence from a wide variety of contexts and perspectives. They will allow you to test your level of knowledge and above all, they will help you to realise the key goal of Understanding The Media which is to ask critical and sometimes tricky questions. 

In the password protected Instructor Resources a range of tutorial exercises are provided. As in the Student Resources, these exercises have been tried and tested with positive results. They are intended to make learning fun as well as engaging. I offer some reflections from my own experiences as a university lecturer on how individual chapters are best taught. The Instructor Resources also contains sample exam/assessment questions which may be used as the basis of term papers or written assignments.

The Instructor Resources site is password protected  Please read the information in the right hand column. To access this section, click on the sign in button on the right hand side below. This section of the companion website contains resources which are available free of charge to lecturers who adopt the third edition of Understanding the Media.