A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Monday, April 02, 2007

COM 150, 209: Today's news, more topics

An interesting story in today's Trib ... about an apparently successful buyer for the Tribune Co. A lot of very good background on the financial health of newspapers ... kinda sickly, with competition from the Internet.

Which reminds me of a couple of good COM 150 term paper topics:

Why are newspapers losing readership? Comptetition from the Internet? Too much news about old men wearing suits and not enough about anything that anybody cares about? Or: Too much fluff about celebrities and not enough about the substantive issues of the day? You hear both argued, and they're diametrically opposed.

"Info-tainment." That's a word of Neil Postman's. How much do the media -- especially TV but really all of them -- blur the line between serious information and entertainment?

How can newspapers win back readers? Especially your generation, the 18-24 demographic. Fluff? Music reviews? Local news? School lunch menus?

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.