Week 1: Student Response and Assignment

ThursdayAug 9 at 11:24am

Manage Discussion Entry

Consumer choice of news outlets and the ability to write their own news has taken the power away from the traditional news model. The audiences are fractured and the new role and responsibility of the mainstream media is to do research to identify their audience, know their audiences' persona, and build a relationship with them (Price, Husni, & Wenger, 2016).

In much the same way that the media holds government accountable by examining and bringing to light what is happening, consumers of traditional media now communicate with the news outlets and hold them accountable. Gone are the days of editors deciding what news they wanted to put forth in a top-down model that was sometimes used for agenda-setting. For instance, research on the media habits of college students, found that most were not interested in politics, did not read the political articles, and that 60 percent said they prefer print publications. (Hedrick, 2015). That would mean that they would not be interested in Fox News. The role and responsibility of the Fox News management is to find a way to entice young people to their site since the young are the news consumers of the future.

The empowerment of the consumer seems to have put them in the driver's seat and media companies may simply ask what their customers want and try to provide it instead of meeting their responsibility to see that Americans are informed citizens.

(Just to make sure, the references are not included in word count, right?)

Judy Wieber

References.

Hedrick, J., (2015). Do College Students Want to see Political News in Their Newspaper? College Media Review. Jacksonville State University. Retrieved from: http://cmreview.org/research-vol-52-do-college-students-want-to-see-political-news-in-their-newspaper/