Exam Review

ASTU 100C JRN

Journalism 100

Professors Alfred Hermida and Candis Callison

Teaching assistant Fabiola Carletti
 Basic Information
Part One: Don’t forget to
Multiple choice (scantron) bring:
• At least one pencil and
one pen
Part Two:
• Your UBC student card
Essay Question
 Lecture One: Introduction

READINGS:
•Dr. Vannevar Bush (1945)
•State of the News Media (2010)

The Origins of the Internet:

Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) invented
the Internet as we know it in the
early 1970s.
 Lecture Two: State of the
Media & Network Structures
Lecture Highlights:

• A computer network called Internet (CBC

Archives, 1993)
•The Internet was becoming more
commercialized – further away from its roots
as a military project, shedding its stigma as a
toy for nerds.
• John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Cyber
Independence (1996) example of utopian
rhetoric, fantasizing about what the Internet
might provide.
 Lecture Two

Lecture Highlights:

•Re-read key questions from State of the News

Media 2010
• Re-read major findings from 2010 report

• Key thinker: Manuell Castells, author of The

Rise of the Network Society (part of the
Information Age trilogy)
Lecture Two
Lecture Two
 Lecture Two

(For best results, compare to the key findings

from the recently released 2011 report)
 Lecture Three:
New Media and Journalism

READINGS:
• Charlie Beckett
• Alfred Hermida
• Clay Shirky

Lecture Highlights:

• Advances in technology and the

introduction of new media fundamentally
alter the nature of mass communication
 Lecture Three

Framework for the New Media

Lecture Three
 Lecture Three
Very Important!
 Lecture Four:
Journalism as a Profession

Journalism as an ideology: A system of beliefs

characteristic of a particular group
 Lecture Four

• Making the news

“…news, like all public documents, is a
constructed reality possessing its own internal
validity.” (Tuchman 1976)

• Journalists as gatekeepers
Highly subjective ... based on gatekeeper’s own
set of experiences, attitudes and expectations
(White 1950)

• The New Journalist understands:

Convergence, Multimedia, Participation
 Lecture Five:
Challenges to Journalism

READINGS:
• Zizi Papacharissi
• Yochai Benkler
• Michael Schudson

Lecture highlights: Very Important!

Knobel and Lankshear (2006) have attempted to
think through the different attitudes toward
change by describing two competing journalistic
states of mind: one which is resistant to the
reorganization of the media landscape and the
other which accepts it as part of a new reality.
Lecture Five
 Lecture Five
Any media, anywhere, any time
•From scarcity to abundance
•End to geographical barriers
•The loss of time
Vast array of choices

The new media landscape

•News information has never been more plentiful
•Journalism has never been more abundant
•Journalists have never had more resources to reach audiences
•Audience has unprecedented access to news media

Mainstream media issues

•Loss of audiences
•Loss of revenue
•Atomisation
•Loss of diversity
•Loss of quality
 Lecture Five
The Gutenberg press
•1448: Invention of Movable What becomes ‘thinkable?’
Type
•First major application of mass
production and the use of
interchangeable parts

Duplication:
•Machine-copying of text
•Speed: Mass production of
text
•Low cost: Lower labour costs
•Distribution: Wider readership
 Lecture Six:
Media and Democracy

Q: What should media provide for democracy?

Media should be a fourth estate, independent

monitor of power.
“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament;
but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a
Fourth Estate more important far than they
all.- Thomas Carlyle (1840)

News media as …
Watchdogs, a free press, able to speak truth to
power, defend the public interest, a foundation for
democracy?
 Lecture Six
Be able to think through these questions:

What is required for decision-making in a democracy?

What is a public or publics?
What is the role of information and technology?
What are the roles of social networks?
What do we expect from media?

Be critical of Technological Determinism! (idea that

technology is the primary force that controls how
individuals and society change)

Technology as a 'web of human practices'

• material (the stuff: pipes, gadgets, bits, etc)
• knowledge
• processes that involve not just the individual, but
institutions, and a myriad of social relations
Very Important! Lecture Six
 Lecture Seven:
The Public Sphere
Journalism is supposed to uphold democracy…
So, what is democracy?

• government by the people; a form of government in which the

supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by
them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
• a state having such a form of government (USA and Canada)
• a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights
and privileges.
• political or social equality; democratic spirit.
• the common people of a community as distinguished from any
privileged class; the common people with respect to their
political power.

(also: see quotations by orators and critics on original slides)

Lecture Seven

Very Important!
 Lecture Seven

Benkler’s simple definition:

the public sphere refers to the set of practices that
members of a society use to communicate about
matters of public concern that require collective
action or recognition (p. 2).

Why is the public sphere associated with the

news media?
Schudson (2003) notes, journalism is a dominant
force in the public construction of common
experience, and its practitioners have had much
control over defining what is important (through the
cultural form called news) for the past two or three
centuries (p. 13).
 Lecture Seven

Other critical voices:

Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922)
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927)
 Lecture Eight:
Information and Democracy

The ideal of the ‘informed citizen’ has a history

Lecture Eight
 Lecture Eight

•Digital era: Ironically, participation

dropped off when people had more
information

• Overabundance of information – how

do we extract the meaningful?

• We’re now in a “monitorial citizenship”

era, keeping one eye on the pool.

•More info, more perspectives, more

conversation than we’ve ever had
before – but has that equaled more
participation? Healthier democracy?
 Lecture Nine:
READINGS:
Media Change
•Mathew Ingram
•Jay Rosen
•Jodi Dean
 Lecture Nine

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find out what it means to …

 Lecture Ten:
Media Change Part II

Check in with these folks and their ideas:

•Manuel Castell re: the network society
•Pierre Levy & Henry Jenkins re: collective intelligence
•Jodi Dean re: communicative capitalism
 Lecture Ten

Very Important!
 Lecture Eleven:
CONVERGENCE!
READINGS
•Henry Jenkins
•Clay Shirky

In original slides, see

quotations from…
Nicholas Negroponte 1979)
Very very Important!
Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983)

WARNING: You absolutely, positively must understand

convergence. Spend extra time on this theme.
 Lecture Eleven
“Welcome to convergence
culture, where old and new
media collide, where
grassroots and corporate
media intersect, where the
power of the media
producer and the power of
the media consumer
interact in unpredictable
ways”
- Jenkins (2006)
On Wednesday …
• Participatory Journalism
• Moving from consumers to producers
• Journalism and Social media
• Privacy
• Journalism Ethics
• Global Social Media & Democracy