Lecture #5-Radio

Well, week 5’s lecture was not what I had expected, but I enjoyed it anyway. We started with an interview of Richard Fidler, which I really enjoyed. He had a few excellent points about radio just as a medium, saying that radio was a more intimate form of media than TV or newspaper. He said that people are often multitasking while listening to radio or pod casts (which I was listening to while planning my day), and he made a good point about radio remaining “unscathed” throughout the emergence of all the new media like the Internet and online news and twitter, and even thriving in the new environment.

I love listening to radio, but mainly because of the music. Only very rarely will I listen to an interview, so it was interesting to hear the tips of radio presenters whose job it is to do that for a living.
Some of these were quite cool, like not being afraid of silence, and using silence as a tool. Another interesting one was having a picture of the type of listener, or audience, that you are entertaining.
Other stuff was pretty self-explanatory, like having good annunciation and keeping the listener “in” on the conversation. Fidler was right when he said that he shouldn't have to tell journalism students to read the paper, and being aware of other viewpoints should be a pretty obvious for aspiring journalists.

My Media Use Diary

 

Media Journal

 

	Twitter	Online News	Television	Newspaper	Blogs	Radio
Saturday	20	30	0	0	15	0
Sunday	10	20	0	0	5	0
Monday	20	10	70	10	30	0
Tuesday	10	20	90	0	0	0
Wednesday	5	10	0	5	0	0
Thursday	5	10	30	0	5	0
Friday	0	0	30	0	0	60
Saturday	5	15	0	5	0	0
Sunday	0	0	0	0	0	0
Monday	0	0	30	0	0	0

Data has been recorded in minutes, and rounded up.

 

As shown by the graph above, while ‘new media’ is becoming increasingly popular, my media usage is mainly ‘traditional’ media i.e. radio, TV and newspapers.

However, when broken down into specific media, TV and online news sources are my obvious favourites.

 

TV

 

I come from a home that doesn’t watch much more than 3 hours of TV a week, and never watches TV news.
I have only recently moved to Brisbane, and the house I am living in has Foxtel, and a big TV, so I have found that I watch much more TV than I used to, which averaged out to about half an hour a day. This is still much less than the average time my peers spent, which was around one to two hours.
Most of TV I watched was sitcom, but after a few days of media blogging, I realised I wasn’t using as broad a variety of media sources as I would have liked, so I began to watch the news, mainly breakfast shows on channel 9 and 7, in the morning before catching the bus to uni.

Online News

My online news comes pretty much purely from abc.net.au/news. I have this webpage set as my home page, so every time I open my web browser, I spend ten minutes scanning the breaking news, or visiting the sports page.
I had a go at trying online newspapers, but most of them are pay walled. I also thought they tended to have too many ‘fluff’ pieces, which I’m not interested in at all.

A curious point to mention is that I don’t have Facebook, which puts me in with the other 11 journalism students who don’t. Despite this, I think it is actually an advantage, seeing as 92% of students said they spent most of their time on the Internet using facebook. I think spending my time reading news is much more productive.

Radio

When I worked full time, before beginning university, I listened to triple j for literally about 7 hours a day. I have found, though, that I haven’t even touched a radio in a long time. The only reason I listened to an hour of radio on Friday was because Bon Iver was doing a segment called Like A Version on triple j, and he is my favourite musician.

The reason I don’t listen to radio is predominantly because I don’t have radio on my iPhone, and I can’t work out how to get my clock radio working properly.
This response is similar to that of my cohort, who, on average, listen to less than an hour of radio a day.

Blogs

I have had a wordpress blog for about a year before I began JOUR1111, so I was quite comfortable using, writing for, and reading blogs. I quite enjoy reading some of my cohorts blogs, it’s great to reading something creative, or find out something new, or check out a link to something cool or different.
Most students didn’t have a blog before beginning this course (63%), but around 30% of students said they spent most of their time using the Internet reading blogs. I thought this was quite a curious fact.

 

Now here is something I’m not sure about yet. Before I got a twitter account, I thought it was full of interesting people, always saying interesting things. Now that I have a twitter account, I admire journalists so much more for finding the gems, the news worthy stories, in amongst the utter rubbish and boring promotions that most tweets tend to be.
I check my twitter feed quite often, roughly two times a day, which isn’t really necessary, but I like to keep in practise for the day when I might need to be checking my twitter feed regularly. At least, that’s what I tell myself. I’m not addicted.

Newspapers

I used to read newspapers a lot, mainly The Australian, and occasionally The Age, but since moving to the city and living by myself, I never by the newspaper. The only times I’ve had the opportunity to read the paper is the free tabloid when it’s left on a seat on the bus.
However, I appear to be in the minority here, as 51% of journalism students who took the survey said they got their news from newspapers.
Maybe they all still live with their parents, and their parents buy the paper. Or maybe I need to make a greater effort.

From the journal I logged I can see that I use a wide variety of media sources, from TV news to Twitter and blogs. From analysing the survey, I’ve found that I am quite news aware, but I don’t read the newspaper and I don’t have a Facebook account, something most of other journalism students have.
All in all, I think I’m happy with how much media I’m consuming, but I think I’ll start reading the Weekend Australian.