Chapter Toolkit 1: The Media Diary

The object of this exercise is to establish the extent and range of your interactions with the media.  With this in mind, you should keep a diary of your media use, consumption and exposure for a period of one week.  Your diary should consider all forms of media use and consumption in the selected seven days. Remember to document as many situations as possible where you are exposed to media texts. For each day note the kinds of media that you use; estimate the amount of time spent in specific kinds of media usage and especially where the print and broadcast media are concerned, highlight the kinds of media genres that you typically engage with. Note also if you are a producer of media content – e.g. YouTube; Facebook, Twitter. Where you consume specific media texts such as radio or film – whether in a public or private context – may also be of significance. It is also worthwhile noting whether you discuss the content of specific media texts with your family friends or colleagues.  Your media consumption extends way beyond the media that you might actively use so you should also document the other kinds of situations in which you consume media texts. In beginning to explain your own media use and consumption patterns you should start by examining your findings in the context of where you ‘fit’ in social terms. You should consider the significance (or not) of your age, location, class, ethnicity or gender in trying to understand your personal media use and consumption. In writing up your report on your media diary you may find it interesting to compare and contrast your findings with the arguments outlined by Morimoto and Friedland (2011) (see Further Reading and Discussion Points).

Commentary on Diary Findings:

1. Can you estimate the amount of time in which you interact with the various media on a daily basis?
2. What proportion of your media activity involves using Social Networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Are there distinct patterns in your access and usage of new media? Are you a producer of media content? (If you are a non-user can you identify possible reason for this?)
3. To what extent is your media use and consumption undertaken alone or in a social setting? (i.e. with family, with a partner, friends or with fellow students).
4. Is your use of television programming primarily about being informed or entertained or both?
5. Identify clearly the media organisations with which you mainly interact. Can you identify who owns and controls them?
6. What proportion of your media consumption involves globalized media texts?
7. Select one ‘story’ during your week of diary keeping and compare and contrast howit was covered by ‘old’ media (e.g. print/broadcast) and in ‘new’ media settings (e.g. online editions of newspapers; blogs; Twitter etc. 
8. Compare and contrast your media consumption compare with that of your fellow students? What sorts of differences emerged and why?
9. The exercise asked you to try and document as many instances as is possible of media exposure. How difficult was this to achieve?

Click here to download an example media diary.

Chapter Toolkit 2: Media Construction of Social Reality
£16,000
That’s what the average asylum seekers family gets a year in handouts
(and it’s all tax-free!)

Families of asylum seekers are getting more than £16,000 in tax-free handouts every year, it was revealed yesterday.
Startling Government figures showed immigrants are better off than newly-qualified teachers or experienced NHS nurses as they wait for their applications to be processed.
Immigration Minister Beverly Hughes admitted the support given to an average asylum-seeking family amounts to £1,340 a month – the after-tax equivalent of a £20,500 salary.
A teacher would take three years to achieve that level of earnings and nurses would need five years of hard work and rapid promotion.
The figure includes cash benefits and housing given to an average asylum seeking couple with 2.13 children – but not the burden on the NHS, schools or the costs to the Home Office and courts of processing asylum claims.
For some families, the figure is far higher than the average. The family of extremist Muslim cleric Abu Hamza, a father of eight, receives £1,000 a week in benefits, although the hook-handed preacher’s own support has been blocked while the Government fights to deport him.
The total cost of the asylum system to the tax-payer is estimated at almost £2billion a year, or £5million a day, covering cash benefits, housing and legal bills. This includes the £174million in legal aid last year and the huge bureaucracy needed to process claims and appeals.
[…]
At the start of this year, [2003] 91,860 asylum seekers were receiving state support – 42,130 members of families and 49,730 single adults.
There are also tens of thousands of families who have been granted asylum but are claiming benefit. Once asylum has been granted, they would move over to the normal benefits system. The Government has struggled to deport large numbers of failed asylum seekers because in problems in tracking them down and the expense of locking them up in secure units and laying on special flights.
Mr. Blunkett recently admitted that he ‘hadn’t a clue’ how many failed asylum seekers were still in Britain, although officials believe the figure runs to hundreds of thousands.
[…]
The chances of winning an asylum appeal have soared from six per cent when Labour came to power to 22 per cent last year. Numbers of successful appeals have rocketed from 1,180 to more than 13,000 – a 12 fold increase.
[…]
Tory MP Andrew Rosindell said ‘A lot of lower-paid workers doing important jobs will be pretty cross to hear of families getting this kind of support just for turning up and claiming asylum.’

Report by Matthew Hickley, Home Affairs Correspondent, The Daily Mail (UK), published December 16th 2003. Reproduced by kind permission © The Daily Mail 2003.

1. Having read the following extract concerning asylum seekers in the UK re-write the ‘story’ as if you were a newspaper reporter. How does your version compare with (a) the original version and (b) the versions produced by your fellow students?

 

2. What is the significance of including or omitting specific descriptors of asylum seekers?

 

3. If you are not based in the UK compare the ways in which asylum seekers are portrayed in the print media where you live. What are the main similarities and differences?

 

4. Consider the significance of the use of language in the construction of meaning for audience members in the piece.

 

5. Media researchers such as Haynes, Devereux and Breen (2006) suggest that media coverage of immigrants make use of ‘othering’ discourses – ie reports will routinely set up an opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Is this in evidence in this article?

In Chapter 2 as part of a discussion on changing media histories we discussed the ways in which radio broadcasts of sports events were usually consumed communally.    Write a history of radio broadcasting in your country.  Pay close attention to the following issues:

1. When did radio broadcasting commence?
2. When did the use of radio as a source of knowledge (news) and entertainment become a common practice?
3. In the early decades of radio broadcasting where were radio programmes most likely to be consumed?
4. What sorts of ownership structures predominated?  Were radio stations owned by the state or by privately owned media companies?
5. Do you think the introduction of radio changed people’s experience and understanding of the wider world?  (It’s sometimes useful to think here about what the social world might have been like before radio broadcasting began).

Haves and Have Nots - Poster Presentation on Media Globalization

The following exercise is meant to be as much about fun as it is about learning.  Design a poster focusing on how media globalization is represented in the advertising strategies used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).  You will find examples of these on their respective homepages, in newspapers or magazines. Your poster should demonstrate how ISPs represent media globalization. What sorts of linguistic and visual devices are employed by the ISPs?  What assumptions do they make about the social world? How do their adverts imagine how the Net is consumed?  Are there any references to the existence of a digital divide?  Be as creative as possible in designing your poster.  There are many free on-line resources which will help you in the design and layout of your poster – see for example www.scribus.net and www.getpaint.net. It is also possible to design a basic poster using Power Point or the freeware package Seashore.

Toolkit 1: Who Owns Your Favourite Television Programme?

Record an episode of any one of your favourite television series broadcast on a privately owned station. From the rolling credits at the end of the programme try and establish which company owns and controls the production and distribution of your selected programme. Use the Internet to establish who owns and controls the company in question and to identify whether there are linkages between it and other media and non-media organizations. Compare your findings with those of your fellow students. What overall patterns emerge?

Toolkit 2: Mapping Media Ownership and Control

In the light of what you have read about changing styles of media ownership in this chapter, map out who owns the key media organizations in your country. What sorts of media organizations predominate? Would you describe the ownership patterns as being mainly public, private or a mixture of both? To what extent are individual media organizations engaged in horizontal or vertical integration? Does the predominance of either media conglomerates or state-controlled media organizations have implications in terms of the contents of media coverage and for news coverage in particular?

Chapter Toolkit 1: Structure and Agency

Do a semi-structured interview with a media professional.  The purpose of the interview is to focus on the understandings and perceptions that your selected interviewee has of his or her audience.  The interview should also take account of the ways in which the concepts of structure and agency can be applied to the everyday work lives of the selected media professional.

Chapter Toolkit 2: Television Texts and Encoding/Decoding

Choosing either a series of television adverts or a recent current affairs television documentary, see if you can identify Hall’s (1974) how the text might be read in terms of dominant, professional, negotiated and oppositional codes. Does Hall’s model help you to think more critically about how media texts are constructed and their possible influence?

Chapter Toolkit 3: Indymedia and News Values

Log on to the Indymedia website (www.indymedia.org) and address the following issues:

1. Summarize what the main stories on its newswire are concerned with. How does Indymedia’s coverage of global affairs differ to that of the mainstream media?
2. In your opinion what sorts of production values predominate in Indymedia’s video-based reports? Are they dominated by first-person eyewitness accounts? To what extent are these reports ‘balanced’ in terms of the sources used and opinions expressed?

Chapter Toolkit 1: Ideology and Dominant Ideology in Newspapers

This exercise requires you to combine some basic qualitative content analysis with an investigation into audience response to a small sample of newspaper articles on a selected theme. Depending upon your individual circumstances you may do this exercise on your own or as part of a collaborative effort with some of your fellow students.

The exercise

In the light of what you have read about ideology and ideological analysis in this chapter, write a critical commentary of no more than 1,000 words on the ideological content of a newspaper of your choice. Identify who owns the publication and, where possible, note its reputed ideological position. Select a maximum of ten articles on a specific theme from the publication in question and explain how, in your opinion, these articles function at an ideological level. It is essential that you give equal weighting in your report to the content analysis and the responses from your sample of audience members.

Content analysis

In doing the content analysis please highlight the following:

• The author(s) of the selected articles.
• The word length of the selected articles.
• The kind of article (e.g. news story/feature/editorial/op. ed., i.e. opinion pieces that appear opposite the editorial).
• The location of the article within the newspaper.
• The stylistic devices employed in presenting the article.
• If photographic images or other kinds of illustrations are used, how do these relate to the ideological dimension(s) of the specific article?
• The use of sources and spokespersons if cited.
• The kinds of ideological perspectives in evidence within the coverage.
• The use of omission – of alternative perspectives or understandings of the phenomena in question – in so far as you can see such.

Audience response

In the second phase of the exercise select at least three samples of audience groups. The structuring of the audience groups should be based upon age, gender and educational attainment. Each group member is asked to do a close reading of the selected texts and then using informal or unstructured interviewing you investigate the kinds of readings that your selected members place upon each of these texts.

The commentary

In beginning the commentary itself please state clearly what you understand by the terms ‘ideology', ‘dominant ideology’ and ‘discourse'. The main body of the report should highlight the following:

What do you consider to be the ideological nature of your selected articles and why?

• What kinds of ideologies and discourses are reproduced within the coverage?
• How do these ideologies relate to existing public discourses about your chosen research theme?
• Does the coverage reproduce the dominant ideology, counter-ideologies or both?
• What sorts of audience response(s) did you get from the various sample groups? To what extent did their readings of the articles vary from your initial content analysis?
• If there was a variety of readings or interpretations of the selected articles by your audience groups how do you explain this?

Chapter Toolkit: Researching media audiences: audience beliefs and public discourses about the socially excluded

Background: You have been invited by a public service broadcasting organization to tender for a research project on audience beliefs about the socially excluded. The terms of the research brief state that you must concentrate on the broadcast media and that you must use an ‘active audience’ theoretical perspective. It is further proposed that you carry out the research in the context of existing public discourses about poverty. You are required to submit a detailed research proposal showing how you would intend to undertake the proposed research project.
Your research proposal should focus on the following:

1. Explain what you understand by the term ‘active audience’ and state why you think this theoretical perspective is applicable to the research project in hand.
2. Outline and discuss your understanding of the term ‘the socially excluded’. What is your understanding of the causes, extent and nature of poverty and social exclusion in your society? Which groups in your society are most likely to fit into this categorization? State whether your research is going to concentrate on one or more categories of groups who are considered to be poor or are more likely to be poor or excluded, e.g. children, women, immigrants, the homeless, the disabled or the long-term unemployed.
3. Show how you will select audience groups from the general population. What factors (e.g. age, gender, socio-economic status or ethnicity) will you consider in terms of defining and selecting audience groups?
4. What research methodologies will you use in order to examine audience beliefs about poverty?
5. In the context of existing public discourses about poverty and social exclusion how will your findings on audience beliefs be analyzed?
6. What media genres would you intend using and why?
7. Outline the benefits for the broadcasting organization that may result from this research.

Chapter Toolkit: Researching Media Audiences: Developing a Research Proposal for the Globex TV Corporation

Context:

The Globex TV Corporation is creating a new television series. They have asked you to submit a research proposal in order to get a better understanding of media audiences which will help them in the development of the series.

Guidelines:
The purpose of the second assignment is to get you to write a Research Proposal. You do not undertake any actual primary research.

Possible Research Topics

1) Young People and Social Media
2) Fans
3) Diasporic Audiences
4) Audiences and Gaming

Steps:

1. Select ONE of the research topics and create a clearly defined research question which will be the focus of your research proposal. In doing so, provide a rationale for why this research question is of personal interest to you. Why is the topic interesting? What do you think it might tell you about audiences?

2. Conduct a literature review. Research the chosen topic, reading and referencing at least three academic sources. Write a 700 word summary of what is known about this media product and its audiences, outlining the following:

a) What are the assumptions/concepts/main theories that influence media studies thinking on this topic?
b) Who are the main contributors/writers in this area?
c) What have been the main findings of this area of research?
d) Where does media studies research currently stand in relation to this topic and its audience?

 

3. Decide on the research method(s) you plan to use to test your research question. In Chapter 8 we have mentioned a wide variety of research methods that you can use. These include:

• Quantitative research methods
• Qualitative research methods
• Questionnaire
• Survey
• Focus groups
• Qualitative interviews
• Observations
• Online/digital ethnography
• Ethnography
• ‘Newsgame’

Research the chosen research method, reading and referencing at least three academic sources. Write a 500-700 word summary of the research method outlining:

a) An explanation of why this research method was chosen over the other methods?
b) What are the main characteristics of this research method?
c) What are the advantages associated with this research method?
d) What are the disadvantages associated with this research method?
e) What are the ethical implications of this research method?

 

4. You should outline how you plan to recruit/gain access to prospective participants of this project. You must outline the advantages and disadvantages of the sampling method that you intend to apply.

5. Write a concluding section in which you reflect on the connections you have made between the key themes discussed in Chapter 8. How different do you think your understanding of audiences is now?

Chapter Toolkit: 

1. Tweet, Tweet:   Do a basic content analysis of the trends evident in Twitter over a period of three days.  As a micro-blogging site, is Twitter predominantly about trivial things or does it also have an importance in terms of allowing a (limited) critique of the powerful?
2. Comparing Old and New Media: Select an international news story which is being covered by both television news and a citizen journalism site such as Indymedia.  Write a report in which you compare the reports in terms of:
3. Their prominence in the news cycle
4. The language and tone used
5. Sources (spokespersons; official and other documents)