Media Monitoring -Russia Plance Crash -500 words conclusion
Assessment 1 Briefing – Media Monitoring
The aim of this assessment exercise is to get you to consume more journalism and think about the different ways different news organisations cover stories. You need to pick a news story and then monitor and analyse the way it is covered in different publications over a week.
What counts as a breaking news story? What kind of story should you monitor? It could be a completely new story – for example, “Kate is pregnant again!”
Alternatively, it could be a new aspect to a running story. For example, one of the big running stories over the last few years or so has been the ongoing conflicts and upheaval in the Middle East. The latest focus of this story is the war in Syria and the rise of IS – so you could focus on a story there that taps into this larger running story.
One of the big running stories a few years ago was the war in Afghanistan. A while back, when we first started doing this assessment, many students covered a specific story related to that – about the spelling mistakes in the letter of condolence the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown sent to a grieving mother whose son had died in the war.
This story started out as an attack on Gordon Brown and the government, led by The Sun, but changed very quickly – with many other newspapers and organisations taking a more sympathetic angle on the Prime Minister and instead criticising The Sun. This worked really well for this exercise because the story changed so much as it developed.
Last year, we looked at the Brooks Newmark story – he’s a Tory MP who resigned after being exposed exposing himself, via social media, in the Sunday Mirror. As it developed, the story changed to become one about press ethics and regulation and whether the journalists who got the story were right to use fake profiles on Twitter to expose Newmark.
Sometimes a great story might come almost out of nowhere – five years ago, many students focused on the rescue of a group of Chilean miners who had been trapped underground. It was interesting because it was a good news story that worked particularly well on TV and online.
Otherwise, the ongoing problems of the economy and day-to-day politics can provide good material. You don’t have to focus on serious subjects – sometimes sports or entertainment stories can work well – if they give you scope to look at a range of coverage and different journalistic approaches.
What does it mean to monitor a story? Track the story as it develops during Media Monitoring week. Look at how the story changes and how those changes are reflected in the coverage in different publications.
What does it mean to analyse a story? Think about the angle and approach taken by each different news organisation. Ask yourself why they take that angle – what kind of larger story are they trying to tell? Try to set the story in a larger context – one that relates this story and its coverage to the way the media works in general.
The main focus of this assessment is online This will allow you look at a variety of different stories, on different sites, and to link to those stories on your blog. You should look at coverage by traditional news organisations along with stories on online only news sites and also blogs and social media, if they are relevant. The aim is to link to contrasting views and approaches and analyse how different organisations and individual journalists take different angles on a story as it develops.
You have to do the monitoring/blogging part of assessment in Media Monitoring week. This starts on Monday November 9th and ends Monday November 16th. All posts should be on your blog by November 16th. You then have two days to write your conclusion, which should be uploaded to Blackboard by November 18th.
You should write three blog posts on the blog you set for this module They don’t have to be really long (500 words maximum). You can go for bullet points and lists of links – but you should try to take a critical/analytical perspective on the material you look at and link to.
The last thing you need to write is a short piece that draws together some conclusions about what you’ve learned from following your story. This should be written as a word doc and uploaded on Blackboard, via the Turnitin link. This doesn’t need to be very long – 500 words maximum. You should try to sum up what you’ve learned about the way journalists and news organisations develop and angle stories. This conclusion should start with your blog address and a quick description of the story you chose to follow. I get you to upload this to Blackboard because it helps with the marking and circulation of feedback.
To recap – for this assessment, you need to:
Write three short blog posts on your module blog, analysing online coverage of your chosen story – each around 500 words long
Final conclusion – 500 words long, uploaded to Blackboard
What sources should you look at?
To do this assessment well, you need to look at a range of sources online – the big news organisations, new online only outlets, bloggers, social media. You should concentrate on UK media, but you can also look at some international coverage if it is relevant to your story, but it should be in English.
Many big news organisations began as more platform specific operations – as newspapers or broadcasters. This still affects how they cover stories so it’s important to think about it. For example, the angle taken by newspapers on stories reflects their political stance and their target audience. They are partisan – and that continues in their online coverage.
In contrast, broadcast journalists operate under different regulations – they have to be impartial. They can’t be politically partisan. This still affects their coverage online – so you need to think about that if you look at the BBC or Sky News or Channel 4.
A key thing to focus on is how online journalism differs to coverage on other media platforms. Online coverage can have a multimedia dimension; it can have interactive elements; it has space for more depth but can also be very immediate. Social media and the contributions of readers play an increasing role in online news coverage and the online news cycle. If you look at the website done by a big news media organization – e.g. a newspaper or a TV channel, think about how their coverage online perhaps differs from the way they would have covered a story in the past.
Some advice on doing this assessment
You have a week to do this assessment – but a bit of time to think about it beforehand. It might be a good idea to start looking at particular stories and how they develop. That will prepare you for the Media Monitoring week. You need to pick a story that breaks in that week. But if you think about it before it will help you identify a good story when the assessment starts
You don’t have to post every day in Media Monitoring week. Remember – you only need to do three posts. But when you post is up to you and should be determined by the story. If the story you choose to track is fast moving, you might post each day for three days. If it develops more slowly, you might space your posts out over the week.
This is not an essay. It’s a monitoring exercise. The key to doing well in this assessment is to read a lot and think a lot about what you read. But it doesn’t then follow that you need to write a lot. What you really need to do is analyse, summarise and synthesise. You need to step back a bit from the 24/7 flow of news and make some general points about how it all works, about why a story is treated in a particular way by one news organisation and in another way by a different publication.
Do not focus on just one day’s coverage. The idea behind this assessment is to get you to think about not just the way different organisations cover specific stories but how they develop those stories – how the stories change and how coverage changes in response, how different organisations pick on different aspects and angles of a story and investigate and develop that angle further over time. You will lose marks if you just focus on one day’s coverage.