Media Use and Production Diary

As a Journalism student who will, hopefully, one day be working in the media, a study of my own use and production of media is a fascinating analysis to undertake. At the start of the course I filled in  a survey to be able to compare my usage with fellow students.

Upon viewing the data some interesting figures emerged. At 25 going on 26 I am definitely one of the eldest in the course. This may go some way towards explaining my lack of aptitude when it comes to use of technology such as twitter and blogging. It would certainly be interesting to see if a rise in age correlated with a decline in use of twitter, facebook, blogging etc.

Over the course of a ten day period I found my consumption of news was overwhelmingly higher than any other media. And the primary source of my news came from the internet, either on my laptop of my phone. Below is a table of how often and how I accessed news and current affairs over the ten day period.

DAY	LAPTOP	IPHONE	TELEVISION	RADIO	NEWSPAPER
MONDAY	2	0.5	-	0.25	-
TUESDAY	1	0.5	-	0.25	-
WEDNESDAY	1	0.5	-	0.25	-
THURSDAY	1	0.5	-	0.25	-
FRIDAY	2	-	1	0.25	-
SATURDAY	1	-	-	-	1
SUNDAY	1	1	-	-	1
MONDAY	1	0.5	-	0.25	-
TUESDAY	1	0.5	-	0.25	-
WEDNESDAY	3	-	-	-	-
TOTAL	14	4	1	1.75	2

 *All numbers are in units of hours.

My most visited sites for news were the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Age, The Guardian, ABC, FOXSPORTS, ESPN CRICINFO and a number of different sites linked from Google News. These are sites I’ve followed for years because I respect their journalists, they seem to be fairly well valued publications, and are usually the top links for stories on Google News.  

In regards to social media I was surprised that I was in the highest percentile for the number of facebook and twitter accounts, and blogging. Over 90% of students used the internet and their smart phones for social media and interestingly over half use social media for news sources as well. Once again, it would be interesting to see if this was higher among the students in the younger age brackets. I found that I only used facebook for about three hours over the ten day period, which is an average of 18 minutes a day. I mostly used my phone to access it, usually on breaks at work or between classes. I think the reason I am not on social media as much as other people in the course is because I am yet to see facebook or twitter as a genuine source of news, even though my tutor Ali did say that over 80% of journalists have a twitter account. I obviously do need to embrace it; I’m just having a hard time doing so.

Given the fact I am now a full-time student, working part-time and rehearsing for a play, I obviously have less spare time than previously. Hence the number of hours I spend using other media has decreased. Below is a table of the breakdown of other media I have used.

Two rehearsals for a play, After The Ball, were my only hours of media production in this period. Considering the course stipulates I need to blog perhaps this is a worrying trend, however my first foray into blogging came immediately after the ten day period. One part of the course I was initially hesitant about was the need to blog and tweet. But the table below shows I am actually quite capable of using ‘new’ media such as internet, smart phones, DVD’s, CD’s etc so hopefully my technophobia is more easily curable than I first thought.

So how does my media use reflect upon me as a journalism student? I think the tables reflect that most of time outside of work and downtime is spent reading news and keeping up to date on current affairs. Certainly the advent of the internet has helped; twenty years ago it would have been difficult to spend more than an hour or two per day reading/watching/hearing news. In total I averaged over 2 hours a day consuming news. Obviously this level of interest I take in the news is a good indication that I am in the right field of study.

Week 2 reflection- Ages of the Web

I approached week 2 with a bit of trepidation knowing I needed to set up a twitter account and to start blogging for assessment. I have never really understood the fascination with these mediums; I have only just really figured out facebook in fact. So I was a little bit nervous about the whole process. The lecture then took us through the different ages of the media, web 1.0, web 2.0 and today’s web 3.0. As someone more comfortable with web 1.0 and “old media” such as newspapers and television, I felt a little bit overwhelmed by the different permutations of the world wide web in the year 2012.

It was interesting to see how this age of the ‘semantic web’ was tied in to news and journalism. The analogy with the jelly beans rung true with me. I consider news to be a right not a privilege. Everyone should be, and deserves to be, informed and knowledgeable about current affairs. One of the slideshows was a graph which showed only 14% of people would pay for online news as opposed to a fairly high 37% for movies, and interestingly enough 29% of people would pay online for books. I suppose perhaps people don’t see the need to pay online when they can see news on television, listen to it on radios, and perhaps pick up a free paper from work or uni etc.

Did I enjoy this lecture? I did, it eased my concerns in a way about whether or not ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ were still alive and well. The following day I had my first tute with Ali Rae, and one of the first things she said was that something like over 80% of journalists use twitter. I was shocked, how could this be? I worried twitter was dumbing down society. People spelling tomorrow as ‘tmrw’, poor grammar lurked around every corner. But the more I use it the more I realise that brevity is an important quality in a journalist and I am constantly checking twitter for news stories from sites such as ABC, SMH, The Guardian etc.