News Values - Lecture 10

I have to be honest. When I saw the next few topics including this lecture I thought to myself. Please, No. Being a third year in a course made up of predominately first years already makes me feel old and sometimes a bit stupid. I put of all my journalism classes to get through all my political science ones first which is why I am starting this now.

When you get to your third year you start to hear repeats of certain topics in different courses. I remember at one point in time all my POLS classes having the exact same topic around the same time in one semester. I have done a similar course to this called Politics and the Media and we went through a lot of media works and sociology of news. So of course I am here thinking, I know all this already. I got over my big fat head and decided to just go to the lecture.

News Values = The amount of importance a story is given by a media outlet and the amount of attention an audience gives.

News values are:

• Impact
• Audience Identification
• Interesting
• Relates to what is happening around you
• Relevant to your cultural audience 
• Pragmatics
• Ethics
• Facticity
• Practice
• Everyday (24/7)
• Source Influence
• Media PR
• News and PR have a love to hate relationship
• News is incapable without PR

Dr. Redman also went into detail about News Worthiness and what factors control the worth of a story to a particular audience. The Galtung & Ruge 12+ factors were too long to state every factor so everyone car look back to their lecture slides. 

Here is a reduced list of 4 basic values (Judy McGregor 2002):

• Visualness
• Appeal to audiences
• Conflict
• A tried & true news value
• Emotion
• Tied up with human interest
• Celebrification of the journalist

"IF IT BLEEDS IT LEADS."

Ethics Lecture 8

I am not sure if I was the only one who thought this lecture was going to be exceedingly boring, then again I think any lecture is going to be exceedingly boring. I know, I am so happy to be learning. Lets just say sitting in a class is not my most delightful hour. However, this hour seemed to be quite the brightened one.

I did spend most of my time looking at the handout that was appointed during this lecture and tried making sure I was super neat and doing exactly right. I think I was convinced that this was going to be secretly marked on the sly and I had to make a good impression.

This lecture was taken by Dr. John Harrison. Nice Guy.

I obviously was not expecting all the photographs in this lecture. I was expecting a hand out with 100 dot points on things not to do in Journalism. So I was quite easily entertained once my low expectations had been squashed.

While there was entertainment there also was theory.

Ethical Theories:

• Deontology 
• Rules
• Principles
• Duties
• Consequentialism
• It's getting a "good" or "right" outcome that matters
• Never mind how you got there
• The end may justify the means (a saying I know too well being a POLS student)
• Virtue Ethics
• Habits and character create virtues such as
• courage
• justice
• temperance
• prudence

My personal favourite billboard that was shown during the lecture was the Air Asia.

In case you missed it.

I remember seeing this near my house and just thinking. Clever.