Meida Assesment - Reflecting on your research from the summer and from the BBC news app what have you learned about your own media use and how you access news content.

Reflecting on the research I did over the summer the way my generation accesses news content has been made a lot easier over the years due to advances in technology. Now you can download a app to your phone and all the content is in front of you, this links in with what Dan Gillmor predicted in 2004 when he said ‘The spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will occur – much more so than today- without any help from mass media as we know it. The people who’ll understand this the best are probably just being born. In the meantime, even the beginnings of this ‘shift’ are forcing all of us to adjust our assumptions and behaviour.’

Also, big media organisations have now opted for using social media as a form of spreading news around the world. As many people now use social media and the percentage of people who go out to buy a newspaper is declining. Even if people don’t have access to a social networking site the newspapers have their own websites which people can access if they want to read a breaking news story or find out more information.

Another way is that we are each other’s form of news, we are what’s called citizen journalists and by sometimes being the first at the scene of a major event we can capture videos, images or sounds that will soon be the centre of the worlds interest. An example of this would be the September 11^th twin towers disaster which shattered lives all over the world, the first footage of this was captured on peoples own personal camera phones and was the first images some people saw. A second example of this would be the London riots of 2011 but this is a different situation, at the riots there were camera crews but they had to be withdrawn due to people attacking them so then they could only really rely on camera phone footage. 

A further reason would be that as time is progressing our generation is coming into power of positions such as news producers, journalists and seems as we have grown up knowing technology constantly advancing then it is easier for us to use rather than producing papers all the time. Also, it is making things more economical as the number of newspapers being produced is reducing which means less trees have to be cut down.   

However, to contrast this it could be said that although the younger generation is now coming into power and overtaking all the important roles they are also getting mainly negative coverage in the news. Mainly if a teenager was to lose their life in mysterious circumstances then newspaper reporters and journalists would look to relate it to drug or alcohol abuse or maybe even try and make it out to be a gang related crime, they don’t often put teenagers in a positive light.

 A 2009 study supports the, ‘Hoodies or Alter Boys’ by Women in Journalism looked at how the news represented teenage boys and after scanning over 8000 news stories they found that over half of them were revolved around crime, in fact the best chance they had of being in a positive light in the news was if they passed away un a violent or tragic end. Some information I got from researching the site ‘Women in Journalism’ showed that news headlines over the years have consisted of thing such as ‘White working-class boys are turning their backs on university even if they do well enough at school, a study revealed yesterday.’ Daily Mail, 19 June 2008, seeing this instantly creates a stereotype for all white working-class boys when in reality, it may only be a percentage but the media may have exaggerated this.  

One problem with social media and online news becoming more popular is sometimes people post hoax news stories and in some cases even the big newspapers believe them and share them onto their own pages. One recent example would be when Floyd Mayweather fought Connor McGregor and there was uproar after as many people were suggesting that it was all a fix. One man posted a news story that said it had all been let out by an insider a few days before that the fight was fixed, the story then said how the insider had been found a couple of days later dead in a bin somewhere all battered and bruised. This story was obviously a hoax and the man in question was found alive and well but it was so believable that The Sun newspaper shared it to their page. This just shows how dangerous it can get if the most important news stories fall into the wrong hands.  

Also, a recent case of hoax stories would be with the Manchester arena attack. As the morning after the world was discovering what had happened parents and families desperately pleaded on Facebook to find their children and other family members, some people decided to post photos pleading but these we fake and made up which obviously would have broken the hearts of the families who would have had family members missing. Once again showing how whatever happens no matter how devastating people still take things into their own hands to upset and disrespect others in society.

Overall, I can notice that the media we use and how we access it is becoming a lot easier to view and post ourselves. Pages such as Wikipedia make it so easy to post online and you can post whatever you like, whenever you like which sometimes can mean hoax stories get published.