Media. We're on it.

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     Ever since the launch of this campaign, South Dakota has gotten a lot of attention for it and a lot of scrutiny for it. For starters, the campaign has been mocked in many ways. It has shown up on national late talk shows, national news outlets, etc. The cost of the campaign is said to have cost nearly a half of a million dollars, dollars that many feel could have been spent in other areas of need for the state. The fact of the matter is that the meth issue in South Dakota is rising. Governor Noem's intentions for the commercial were to raise awareness for the issue. Well, tons and tons of people all across the country are talking about this campaign and in that sense I think it was a success. There is an old saying that says, "All press is good press" and people talking about the issue will in theory help fix the issue at least a little bit. For more of the feedback and quotes from respected professionals view this article from the Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/18/meth-were-it-says-south-dakota-new-ad-campaign/.

     I hope you have enjoyed this blog throughout the semester. This is my final post with the class ending soon and my graduation upon us.

What Everyone Needs to Know about Public Relations

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Public Relations. What is it? How does it affect our daily lives? Why should we care about the industry? Honestly, I can't answer that final question, because you as a person have a right to care about whatever you want. I will tell you the important facts about the industry based on a similar article I found. Like the article states, "very few people can explain what people in public relations really do. Honestly, even being a Mass Communications student, I cannot really explain the daily tasks of a PR professional. PR agencies try to promote their clients, products, and themselves, but unlike advertisers, PR agencies persuade their external or internal audiences via unpair or earned methods through the tradition media, social media, speaking engagements, and through trusted not paid sources. I won't reexplain the article, but in an overview of it, the article gives five things everyone should know about public relations.

1. What is public relation?
2. How is public relations different than advertising?
3. What is news?
4. Can social media replace traditional media? (The answer is no, by the way)
5. Can you measure PR?

I suggest reading the article if you struggle to define what a PR professional does, or if you are thinking of becoming a PR professional.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2016/01/21/five-things-everyone-should-know-about-public-relations/#5036f2872a2c

How can advertising be effective?

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This week's chapter talked about advertising and the different ways advertising can be effective. Whether it is a visual advertisement on a billboard or in the newspaper, an audio ad on the radio, or a commercial on television, different advertisements have different ways of being effective. According to an article on hubspot.com, advertising can go to work for your company in a variety of ways:

• To raise awareness for your brand
• To drive potential customers to your business
• To promote sales for both new and existing products
• To introduce a new product or service to the market
• To differentiate your product from your competitors'

Advertising can be effective in a variety of different ways:

• Print and posters
• Newspapers and magazines
• Outdoor ads and billboards
• Public transit ads
• Radio
• TV commercials
• social media ads

Without even realizing it, we see hundreds and sometimes thousands of ads every day. Some ads are more effective than others, because obviously no one is able to remember every ad that they see. Overall we subconsciously don't realize how much advertisements influence us each day.

Article credit: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/advertising

A $10.5 Billion Annually Industry is Dying? Hold on a Second

Image Credit: Premierecinemas.net

How many times per week or even per month do you go to the movie theater anymore? For me, I am lucky to one movie about every six months. Is that a budget and time issue? I would say as a soon to be graduating college student that my limited budget and time has a lot to do with it. There is also a side of me that just doesn't enjoy spending money to sit in a nice seat for two and a half to three hours on a nice day and watch a screen. I would much rather use that time to go on a hike, take my dog on a walk, or really just do any sort of physical activity outside. Now this is 100% my opinion and I will admit that I am just not the movie buff that many people are. I may not want to spend the money, but obviously many people are. The movie industry still takes in between ten and a half and eleven billion dollars annually, and yet people think the industry is dying. I have seen more theaters renovate and upgrade their features such as seating and projection than I have seen theaters that have closed up for good. I found an interesting article that has experts in this industry give their opinions on how the industry is doing and most believe that it is doing just fine.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/movie-exhibition-distribution-future-1202152832/

Trends of Radio Today Related to Sports Broadcasting

Broadcasting the sport I love (baseball) in Duluth, MN

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This week's chapter was all about sound media and more specifically radio. And let me tell you I enjoyed every second of it. As an aspiring sports broadcaster, most of what I do involves a radio station. It is the power of my voice and ability to describe a play that gets me hired for a job and has listeners coming back game after game. So I found a story from this past April that highlights some of the new trends in radio today, but instead of reexplaining the article's points I am going to tie each point into the sports broadcasting world.

1. Develop and highlight talent as the face of your brand

This is an easy one. Sure, the talent is the broadcaster and the way he or she describes the action. The real talent in all sport situations are the athletes on the field or court. A broadcaster can be the greatest at what they do, but its the athletes that make the broadcaster sound good based on the events that happen throughout the game and if a broadcaster cannot understand that, they shouldn't be in this profession.

2. Emphasize local

In smaller sports markets such as collegiate athletics, minor league teams, etc., usually it is a local radio station that is the "Home" for the teams coverage. With the local coverage comes local advertisers and for the most part a centralized local team audience and following.

3. Visualize your show

This point takes away from the truly radio and voice only aspect of the industry, but some people prefer visuals. Many sports teams have simulcasts of the radio broadcast through the visual broadcast whether that be a live stream online or on cable TV. In a different aspect in order to be a radio broadcaster, it is essential to visualize your show because you are the listener's eyes for the action in front of you.

4. Repurpose more content

Many broadcasts use the audio for highlights of the team and displays on social media and there website in order to promote the team.

5. Female Focus

Just like the radio industry in general the sports broadcasting industry is catching up with the times in the sense that more female talent is emerging.

6. Cut the commercial load

Commercials are essential for businesses to stay afloat and that is evident with radio stations as well, but more stations are using the promo strategy instead of recording commercials. The listener must already enjoy listening to a sports broadcaster if they are listening to the broadcast so why not just give the broadcaster the ability to through in a promo every now and then when there is some time or a break in the action. No promo will sound exactly the same because they are not prerecorded and the broadcaster is able to fill time when there may not be much else to say. A win-win situation for the both the radio station and the broadcaster.

https://radioink.com/2019/04/14/7-trends-impacting-radio-today/

Saying Goodbye to Traditional Newspapers?

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Let's face it, it is put up or shut up time for the newspaper industry. In a world of tablets, computers, cellphones, etc., the digital age is and has been taking over. People today aren't happy with the traditional newspaper model of getting information once per week or even once daily. People want the up-to-the-second information that they have access to literally at their fingertips. And let's face it, the digital age and technology like this in general isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, technology will only continue expanding. With that said, newspapers have basically two options. Give way to the digital age and go completely 100% digital or find ways that even today's younger adults will want to pick up a newspaper to read it. The former of the two options may be the easiest, but it would also see a significant decline in the older generation of reader that prefer the traditional ink-on-paper style or maybe they just don't have access to the new technology or skills to use it. Somehow, my hometown newspaper, The Miller Press, in a town of 1300 people can still get by printing once per week. Is it because the community is majority of the older population, most likely yes, but will newspapers like this be able to sustain themselves forever, I honestly do not think so. In the end, whether you prefer a hard copy of the newspaper or the digital variety, the world is continually moving digital and one end of that spectrum will have to adjust significantly.

Screen Multitasking is Hurting our Brains

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This week's chapter focused on media literacy, but some parts of media literacy deal with understanding how much and how harmful screen multitasking can be. Screen multitasking is basically have more than one source of media providing media simultaneously. Things such as having the television on while working on a computer or just scrolling through social media while also having the television on. So it got me thinking, how bad is this screen multitasking and how is it really affecting our brains? So I turned to an article from sciencealert.com that had a neuroscientist explain this. The phenomenon of media multitasking is so common that an estimated 178 million adults in the United States alone regularly use another device while watching TV. Researchers in a test found that the ability to sustain attention was poorer for heavy multitaskers. "Complex working memory is closely linked with having better focus and being able to ignore distractions. With brain scans of the participants of the research found that the area of the brain the is involved in controlling attention is smaller in heavy multitaskers. In the end, multitasking is a part of our society in large part to our shorter attention spans and the need and ability to gain information in a short amount of time. Maybe we should consider dialing back the multitasking in order to improve brain function.

https://www.sciencealert.com/multitasking-is-not-a-good-way-to-train-your-brain-here-s-why

Video Games Harming Society?

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This week we looked at the different forms of entertainment in Chapter 9 of our textbook. Of course there is the obvious forms such as music, movie, television shows, along with some in person entertainment such as plays and sporting events (at the venue). In the past fifteen years, the video game industry has taken off as one of the leader in entertainment. There is controversy, however, on whether or not video games are causing mental issues among the public. There is a general ratings system put in place to censor some violent/shooter games from children to prevent this, but games are protected by the first amendment like any other form of expression. The controversy is so large that I have decided to do some extra research on this topic in the form of my research paper for this, Mass Media Issues, class. Honestly, I don't think video games have that huge of an impact on the way people act in the real world especially violently. With my research I hope to prove that video games are not causing violent behaviors. Other psychological issues could have easily impacted decisions of violent individuals way before they picked up a video game controller.

We are being Spied On

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This week, we looked at how people are affected based on TV, radio, and social standing ratings and how these ratings impact what advertisements we are viewing. Rating such as Neilsen (TV), Arbitron (radio), and Gallup (social standings) among others, all have a huge impact on our lives. A classmate brought up an interesting point in our discussion this week. Many of us in today's age only see advertisements on social media and websites, and they tend to all be advertising things that we have already viewed or looked up online. How is this even possible. Is there really spy-like technology in our phones and computers that tracks literally everything that we search and it creates advertisements based on that? It is kind of creepy how say instagram knows to put a wallet advertisement based on you doing research on what wallet you should buy. I have even seen exclusive videos for certain types of wallets that I have researched. Is this what our world is turning to ? Technology being used to literally spy on a person's every action online? What happened to privacy? Is there anything that we can do to actually stop this? Honestly I don't think there is any way to make sure our privacy is a bigger priority. Phone manufactures such as Apple and Samsung haven't made the necessary adjustments to make sure the privacy when online is a priority. In fact, these companies have been criticized for practically encouraging less privacy for their own ratings and statistics. I don't think this issue will change anytime soon unfortunately.  

What a Scary World?

Our discussion post this week was titled, "Is the world more dangerous than it used to be?" and this had me thinking about the recent mass shootings around the country. Gun control is a big debated topic in the recent weeks (THIS POST IS NOT GOING TO EXPRESS MY VIEWS ON GUN CONTROL). Much of the media around the the last month has focused on the mass shootings, and it should focus on these tragedies and the news surrounding each one. However, much of the media today only focuses on the bad parts of our world. From global warming issues to big crimes committed, to celebrity scandals, but what if the media focused primarily on the good things that happened in our world. People are scared of what COULD happen because of what they see in the news. Sometimes, crime is fueled through what criminals see in the news. Many people are getting arrested because they see whats happening with the mass shootings and think, "I can do better than that". Obviously the media isn't trying to fuel these individuals into thinking like that and possibly influencing them to act on that arrogance, but is there a way to prevent this? People need to know what is happening around the world, good and bad, but it should be possible to report the news without influencing criminals to act on their arrogance. I just don't know how media professionals will be able to do that. Keep the news interesting, but not give criminals the idea of how to commit crime.