Archive for the ‘RA’ tag
what people read
I’m keeping a tally on the day’s most read, most emailed and most blogged lists on the LAT and NYT websites.
Eventually we’ll check “the people’s stories” against the importance accorded to them by editors … and see what the correlation is, if any.
So what kinds of stories do people read and email and blog about?
The list is dominated by U.S. political news (mostly the election), opinion pieces (most of them on the former category) and business news (particularly big picture pieces on the U.S. economy). There’s little (but some) on Iraq. And a few stories that deal with our daily lives (email tsunami, for example).
To the reg:
you are gravely missed. you were grim and gray from the outside but hearth and home to regulars … of which i wasn’t, but still. this i know: if your catalog promised a copy of media studies journal, you’d have it. and if it advised that all 21 issues were at the circulation desk, yet you couldn’t find them anywhere, not even in the musty back room where obscure, unfiled books go to die — you’d dash off to check the four corners of earth.
you wouldn’t correct forthwith the errant catalog.
hypothesis
Has American foreign reporting been focused on the wrong issues for the past 20 years?
This semester, I start work as a research assistant. My professor’s hypothesis: The U.S. news media is not covering global issues in a way that most Americans can understand or want to know about, leading to a general lack of interest in foreign affairs on the part of the American public.
He has brainstormed three angles of approach: the American public, the American press, and the foreign public.
- What are the global issues that concern people? What are the elites interested in? versus the general public?
- By contrast, what are the issues that end up on the front page or on the air?
- What do foreign bureaus do? What’s their agenda? How do they go about covering issues?
- What do foreigners want Americans to understand about them?
Further, what are the important events of the last 20 years? And at what point did the press discover each event’s importance?
