Discussion Question #1
The recent trend of making the news more entertaining only serves to dilute the importance and relevance of the actual important news stories. The peppering of puff pieces with real news detracts from the impact when a real news story hits. More time is spent on human interest stories than the actual news sometimes, and therefore people will pay more attention to that. The role of news to educate viewers can get sabotaged by the need to keep people feeling better and entertained. While the news may be seen as ‘sad,’ there is no need to force happy stories down the throats of the viewer in an attempt to make them feel better. That shows a tremendous lack of respect for the viewer and the public at large. People watch the news for a reason, and that is to be informed; any other priority is completely secondary to that goal.
Response #1 - 03/29/2011 04:29 AM , by: Julia
Julia, the news does not have a duty to be entertaining – whether it bores you is not the issue, it is whether or not it is informative. I personally believe that making room for the entertainment-based stuff can tend to blur the line for viewers between what is important and what is not, muddling their priorities as to what to listen to.
Response #2 - 03/29/2011 05:42 PM , by: Shante
Shante, you raise an important point – as long as the new media is reporting factual information, the social responsibility part is taken care of. This is an interesting perspective, as the social responsibility part is then defined as merely not lying to the public. Sure, factual news is important, but what about relevant news? I believe the news should not only give us true information, it should give us the news we actually need to hear.
Discussion Question #2
Process analysis is a type of article or paper that describes how to do something in great detail. This will inform the audience and permit them to follow your instructions and accurately replicate a process or series of steps to do or make something. It is absolutely vital to follow all four steps in process analysis - 1) Identifying your audience, 2), Considering your audience, 3) Listing the steps, and 4) describing the steps in detail. Skipping a step in this process would mean that you would either write an analysis in a way that would not benefit your audience at all (which would be not helpful), or not accurately describing the process, which would spell doom for your essay. Therefore, it is extremely important that you research both your audience and the process you will be writing about to get the most accurate, pointed information in your essay.
Response #1 - 03/30/2011 06:30 AM , by: Jacqueline
Jacqueline, I agree that the article is well-researched for its subject, and it helps to get a complete perspective on how video games are made into movies. Their logic behind putting a game out before a movie is sound; a tie-in game to a movie is never a good idea, whereas an original property like a video game can help to build interest for the arguably more profitable movie when it would come out.
Response #2 - 03/31/2011 02:15 AM , by: Angelina
Angelina, I agree that they did a great job of adding information both from people working in and outside Electronic Arts, giving them equal weight and clarifying the points they wanted to make. They do indeed start to go off topic with other subjects – perhaps they wanted to justify the research they did by including it in the article anyway, even though it wasn’t important.
