Submitted by on November, 2014
This lesson delves into the way that news consumers access information — text, audio, video and digital — shapes the message they receive. Each news medium offers a dimension not found in the others and each has strengths and weaknesses. This builds on the five wise words from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian scholar and philosopher who explored media and communications a half-century ago. “The medium,” he said, “is the message.”
Key Concepts Include:
- Print, TV, radio, websites and social media outlets all have their own strengths and weaknesses. A savvy news consumer is aware of them and uses them all to get the whole story.
- Newspapers and magazines, both in print and online, still offer the most comprehensive coverage, but market forces, technological advances and demographic changes have dramatically reduced their resources and reach.
- The power of images.
- Radio has survived by maintaining an intimacy and immediacy and developing its own style of storytelling.
- TV news is still the primary and most-powerful tool for following breaking news stories with compelling visuals, but it exists in an entertainment medium whose techniques may have an impact on the fairness and accuracy of a report.
- Social media has taken center stage as a news source, but the evolution of the news consumer to news producer has brought a proliferation of misinformation.
- News websites, search engines and mobile devices have broadened the reach of news consumers while presenting them with new challenges — information overload, questions of authenticity and confirmation bias — in their pursuit of reliable information. A key lesson: Rankings of search engines do not necessarily indicate the reliability of a website or piece of information found online.
Objectives of this Lesson:
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of different media platforms and what types of stories are best suited for each.
- Describe how the newspaper industry has changed in the age of the internet.
- Identify how TV news uses entertainment techniques to present news stories.
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of new media platforms for the presentation of news.
Lesson Vocabulary:
- Social Media
- Crowdsourcing
- Filter Bubble
- Search Ranking
- Search Engine Optimization