Sheldon Media A level exam blog - Mr Bush

 Part 1: Clay Shirky lecture Go to the Nieman Lab webpage (part of Harvard university) and watch the video of Clay Shirky presenting to Harvard students. The video is also available on YouTube below but the Nieman Lab website has a written transcript of everything Shirky says.  Play the clip AND read along with the transcript below to ensure you are following the argument. You need to watch from the beginning to 29.35 (the end of Shirky's presentation). Once you've watched and read the presentation and made notes (you may want to copy and paste key quotes from the transcript which is absolutely fine), answer the questions below: 1) Why does Clay Shirky argue that 'accountability journalism' is so important and what example does he give of this? Accountability journalism prevents, or reveals, civic corruption, which is necessary for a functioning democracy. It  also acts as a mechanism to "discipline elites" by keeping them in check.  Shirky uses  the story of ...

 Read Media Factsheet 76: News Values and complete the following questions/tasks.  Our Media Factsheet archive is available here - you'll need your Greenford Google login to access. 1) What example news story does the Factsheet use to illustrate Galtung and Ruge's News Values? Why is it an appropriate example of a news story likely to gain prominent coverage?  The higher a news story scores on this list, the more likely it is to become news. Using the example pictured, Afghanistan, in terms of geographical proximity, is far away from the U.K. but when a young British soldier dies, the story gains cultural proximity as British audiences see the soldier as ‘one of their own’. On an intensity scale, the first female officer to be killed is considered more newsworthy as it is unusual. The ongoing war in Afghanistan is a continuity story but often the interest in the story lies in that fact that deaths, even though inevitable, are not predictable; a bomb disposal expert may be...