OLD STUDY GUIDES, latest to earliest, go on ARCHIVES for student quiz and exam studying.
PROJECT DEADLINES:
Semester Project
A Conversation with observation of one Communications employee.
This project on road to internship and job and career
Step One: To Choose a Communications Professional in Fairbanks or other city (Ester, North Pole, Fox) in the Interior. Approved Feb. 2-4 by instructor.
Research the person and organization. Keep good notes and good contact information. Call or email your person to ask if they will assist you and when you can meet. Feb. 4: Interview tips from Hank Nuwer
For February 27: Complete all interviews:
For March 13: Any factchecking and Profile written. Email as Google Doc file to Hank Nuwer. Photo of person optional but recommended to accompany story.
March 13 to April 29: 10-minute presentations to class to be assigned by date.
Grading: Discussion & class presentation of a graded assigned paper: 25 percent. This will involve interviewing an assigned expert or newsmaker in the Fairbanks area in some field of communication. You will then write a 750 (maximum 900) word paper and a 15-minute class presentation derived from your interview and research.
__________________
Lesson Plans: Books and Newspapers, Part One: Feb. 4 and Feb. 6
Be able to trace the growth of newspapers and their current financial challenges
- Penny press. P. 76
New York Morning Herald. Correspondents abroad
- Important journalists: Investigative journalist Nelly Bly and publisher Joseph Pultizer
- Important Newspapers:
Historically African American Chicago Defender: The Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance. The newspaper helped shape and respond to the migration, which lasted from about 1915 to 1970.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/remembering-chicago-defender-print-edition-1905-2019
Yellow Journalism: scandal sheets. Name derived from comic character, the Yellow kid (his words and dialogue were in his yellow shirt)
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/the-yellow-kid/4005-66506/images/
192os beginning of chains
Convergence: the importance of Multimedia:
https://cpjw.unc.edu/2023/story/10/?portfolioCats=12
Advertising:
Percentage 60 percent ads to 40 percent news. Color advertising pays for color on a news page.
Collapse of classified ads
Demographics still make corporate advertising appealing
Decline overall
2012
https://www.statista.com/chart/596/advertising-revenue-of-us-newspapers/
Employment and other important news
https://redline.digital/us-newspapers-statistics/
Buffalo Courier Express
https://www.ebay.com/itm/264950997882
Firewall: advertising and editorial not so distinct
Nonprofit
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
- 89: attracting younger readers
Quote: top pf 91: Jefferson
Project Update: Interview tips
Tip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eOynrI2eTM
(David Duke KKK leader turned Louisiana politician example)
Research: Learn about the company’s history, values, and culture. You can also research the interviewee’s background and previous work.
Ask permission before taping on your phone or recorder. Verify date and time of interview with your interviewee. Take notes only if they refuse permission to tape. It happens.
Imagine yourself as the person interviewed (Canada)
Evaluate the questions and technique from Justice Harvey Brownstone.
Baran:
P. 56: Books can make a difference–movies, TV news, social media, conferences, town meetings.
Current Event: Trial of https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/sir-salman-rushdie-prepares-to-face-his-attacker-in-court-0xzztddc7
Current events: Tariffs with Canada, Mexico, China imposed by U.S. government. What is the latest?
Super Bowl: KC and Philadelphia. But also the ads and performers at half-time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adkICTkIZeA
Page 55: Top
Books to know on p. 55
We discussed on Thursday briefly Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Lived 1907-1964)
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) was a landmark book that sparked the modern environmental movement. It raised awareness of the dangers of pesticides and the chemical industry’s influence on legislation. The book’s message inspired new policies, the development of environmental sciences, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, and Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” is widely credited with significantly influencing the public awareness that led to the establishment of this environmental holiday, .
Page 56: Libraries
How important were storybooks to you at ages five, six?
Do you use libraries at all? How have libraries had to adapt and change?
1st PRIVATE LENDING LIBRARY: The first lending libraries in the United States were the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Franklin Public Library.
1st PUBLIC LIBRARY: The Franklin Public Library in Franklin, Massachusetts is America’s first lending library. In 1778, when the town was incorporated, the designated name Exeter was changed to Franklin in honor of Dr. Benjamin Franklin.
Local Trivia: George C. Thomas Memorial Library was Alaska’s first library.
- Built in 1909 in Fairbanks, this log building was the first public library in the area.
- The library was funded by George C. Thomas, who also donated money to buy books. (City paid $1 for a lot).
Censorship: Students in 30s in Germany
Bruce Severy: 
Excerpt from Hank’s next book: Censorship
Trial by Storm
Before moving to North Dakota to teach in 1974, Californian Bruce Wayne Severy created poems published by little magazines. Some charged a reading fee. He dreamed of placing his work in prestigious literary and popular magazines. He aspired to earn a graduate degree in creative fiction.
At the time of his interview with the school board of Drake High School, Severy barely made ends meet as a substitute teacher in Southern California. He also earned an additional pittance as a freelance correspondent for The Guardian, self-described by him as “an independent radical newsweekly.”
Thus, his politics as a person and journalist without question fell into the realm of left-wing liberal. He also valued his family, art, and the poetry and prose of contemporary writers. How oft-expressed dream to friends was that he earn an advanced degree in creative writing and publish a body of work as poet and photographer. Severy was 26 and in love with literature.
Bruce and his wife told one another that small-town living might be just the thing for a happy life. Surely, he reasoned, the state’s Midwestern values made it a safer and kinder place to live and work than Long Beach or Los Angeles. They assuaged their doubts about bearing up in the state’s bitter winters by comparing the cost of living in Southern California to North Dakota. They envisioned buying a fixer-upper home for a fraction of what they might pay for a California dump. They expected to eat well and cheaply on vegetables sold at a well-stocked farmers’ market.
Drake then and now was farm country quite dependent on poorly paid migratory workers.
Bruce did have a long bushy beard, but so did many males in North Dakota, including superintendent Dale Fuhrman at one time to counterbalance his thinning topknot. A broad and athletic outdoorsman, Fuhrman once taught band and liked to play cards. A big bluffer, he believed canasta was never meant to be a friendly game.
Bruce told the hiring committee he liked to hunt. Fuhrman promised the candidate they one day the two of them could wingshoot ducks.
The board hired the outdoorsman/English teacher. Bruce later said he wasn’t sure anyone else had applied for the position.
**********
Bruce and his wife were reared as city kids, and they didn’t understand the ways of Drake farmers any more than the farmers understood his stand on the need to challenge his students to become thinkers independent of their parents.
Many Drake families tried to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Karene and Mike Duchsherer farmed but worked hard at additional jobs to get the bills paid. Mike delivered coal to businesses and the Drake School for heating its massive furnace. Karene drove grain trucks and school buses. She also worked at the post office. She fought some painful medical issues. By the end of her life, she had 55 kidney stones removed, her 2021 obituary revealed.
The Severy family’s first problem with the town after the big move from California came when Bruce gave his five-year-old daughter an illustrated sex education book for kids, causing the parents of her playmates to wince because she showed them the pictures. Bruce apologized and said he’d keep the book at home.
Next, some locals flat libeled Bruce. They said he’d been toking up with his students, a calumny he hotly denied. This time the schoolboard caved, apologized, and admitted there was nothing to the false rumors.
For the most part, the 1972-1973 school year went without a hitch. Bruce and Sally visited the farms of students and chatted with their parents. One parent reserved a small patch of farmland for them to put a garden. He hunted and fished with locals. and Sally joined the Buttons and Bows Club, a ladies’ society of homemakers.
The furor began, however, when Bruce assigned Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to students. What the board members and general community knew about Slaughterhouse-Five was Bruce’s opening lecture revealed that Kurt’s novel questioned the morality of the Allied bombing of Dresden.
Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nputMJi7U
In Drake. you proclaimed your love for the country right or wrong, and if you didn’t love it, by Gosh, you needed to leave it.
Then, right away, the faster readers had found words in the novel only permitted in Drake when someone accidentally slammed a car door on a hand.
**********
Opposition to Bruce and his teaching came from the entire school board, the owners of Drake’s single drugstore, and especially, Karene Duchsherer, the married granddaughter of the school-board president. The attack originated with 10th grader Kim Duchsherer, according to Bruce Severy’s detailed notes taken during board meetings. “Kimberly was a bit of a prissy girl,” recalled former Drake student Katy Olson. Other students got the impression that Kim felt superior to them, said Olson. “Her mother had a raunchy vocabulary and liked to tell dirty trucker jokes.”
At the time those who heard examples of Karene’s occasional barnyard-style jokes were floored to hear that she was objecting with such vehemence to coarse words in the Vonnegut book. Did some Drake people consider Karene’s frontal assault on foul language a bit hypocritical? “The irony did not escape notice in our family,” noted Katy Olson in an email conversation with this writer.
Back then, newspapers reported that she buttonholed her mother in the bedroom where the two could talk girl-to-woman. Kim accepted fully the authority of her mother.
Karene Duchsherer had been a popular student herself long before at Drake High School.
Karene Duchsherer loomed as an imposing presence at school board meetings where some members rarely uttered a peep.
Karene Duchsherer, in turn, passed her daughter’s concern on to her own mother, Mrs. Ida Kemper, wife of Clayton Kemper, a town father, and clerk of the school board. He owned land like nobody’s business, and Drake people looked to him as the city’s patriarch.
The issue squarely was that Duchsherer felt that free speech should take a back seat to the right of a parent to keep what she considered trash away from her child. Moreover, she thought that a school board had a duty to take the trash away from all students—even from those whose parents wanted their children exposed to literature.
At first, Bruce wasn’t worried when the school superintendent informed him about the complaint. “I was more concerned because about half my class could barely read or write,” he said in a phone interview.
Clayton Kemper saw no problem. Shut down the book and assign a classic in its place, he said at the board meeting.
That might have ended matters. The board might have buried the books in a storage room. That would have drawn no attention. Instead, the school’s janitor tossed Kurt’s masterpiece into a furnace.
No one ever would say publicly who the Einstein had been that hatched the solution. “I don’t remember who said we should burn the books but somebody said it,” board president Charles McCarty told the press.
School superintendent Dale Fuhrman said he’d take care of the matter. “I gave them to the janitor as I would my waste paper,” Fuhrman said to s reporter.
And what about janitor Sheldon Summers? “I work here,” he said. “I only follow orders.”
That argument hadn’t worked so well at the 1946 Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Nonetheless, years after the Drake censorship debacle, Bruce Severy would say to this writer that the one regret he had was that the simple, unsophisticated janitor found himself unsure and embarrassed to continue living in Drake after some in the community harangued him.
Summers followed orders on November 7, 1973. He threw into the giant blue furnace about 70 copies of the Vonnegut novel.
After a few Drake students refused to turn back Slaughterhouse Five as the school demanded, employees searched the children’s lockers and confiscated copies. Newspapers reported the search and seizure.
Following the seizure, a small number of vocal students staged a protest in the high school’s library.
**********
In 2021, Katy Olson revealed her troubling recollection of her time as a student at Drake High School as her beloved teacher left Drake in disgrace.
“I grew up in a house of books. Hundreds of books. So, imagine our dismay and outrage when the Drake school board burned those books. We read them in our house, and I read them with the remaining four other students in Mr. Severy’s class,” wrote Katy.
“I wrote letters to the editor of the Drake newspaper defending Mr. Severy, a man with a love of ideas. I loved his class; we had a visiting poet help reveal the poems hidden inside ourselves and held many great discussions about issues confronting our world. So, I staged sit-ins in the library in support of Mr. Severy’s right to teach and my right to be taught by him. It was the beginning of my lifelong fight for the right of ideas to be freely expressed and the protection of those who pose radical ideas. The very idea this nation was founded upon.”
Summarize:
E-book popularity p. 61-62
Conglomeration: 5 big publishing conglomerates and independent presses.
Independent Press (pp. 65-66) editor Rick Ardiner and his wife
https://www.pbs.org/video/limberlost-press-xozi2v/
https://www.pbs.org/video/limberlost-press-xozi2v/
_____________
Current events: at least 10 states give parents power above librarians as to what books should appear in libraries.
The Fault Is in our Stars (Cancer patients fall in love)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyzXpZ3iByM
John Green: interview (pay attention to interview itself)
The Episcopal Missionary Society in Alaska believed they had a responsibility to provide reading materials to people in isolated areas. According to local tradition, in 1905 eight “sourdoughs from Fairbanks wrote to the Reverend Peter Trimble Rowe, first Episcopal Bishop in Alaska, asking for “mental food.”
Great Alaskans of Historical Importance:
https://thecordovatimes.com/2024/09/15/last-frontier-days-peter-rowe/
Big books support smaller author books
From book pages to a new sport at some campuses:
Books: Step to finish
Go over what we touched upon barely last Thursday.
You have a vague notion or a need to express yourself in a book. That’s not good enough. You must make the notion into a fact-based IDEA or IDEAS. You write a proposal (about 20-30 pages with one sample chapter.
- OR, a publisher discovers your work and asks you to write the book. Same thing: You write a proposal (maybe 10 pages) with one sample chapter. IU Press
- You get a book contract stipulating words, deadlines, rights, copyright, photo and illustration responsibilities, index and legal liability issues.
- You work a year up to many years on the project while your other books or a job support you.
https://theamericanscholar.org/10-famous-authors-with-surprising-day-jobs/ You edit and fact-check. You catch errors and stay the course.
- Editor and/or editorial board reads the manuscript. (3-6 months rewriting). You purchase illustrations and photos. You fight to get a reasonable image of your novel on the cover.
Your editor sends book proof (galleys) to get “blurbs” from well known persons in field. A book blurb is a one-to-three sentence micro-review of a book. It’s function is to express a positive, excited and ‘wowing’ description of the book that will provoke a reader to buy and read it. Sometimes a book blurb is one word – but the word is eye-catching and powerful. The book blurb is an important part of the marketing life of a book. It is written before a book is published and intended to support the publicity and marketing cycle of the book/author.
- One day the mail arrives with an actual book.
- Reviewers receive the book about the same time.
- Optional: A movie producer takes an option on your book. Then it may actually become a movie. A screenwriter takes your story and adapts to the screen. (Fact-based)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgW3vJqh864
- 54. Books are agents of social and cultural change.
- a) How did Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle do that?
- b) 1918-1937. A movement with authors, artists, cultural leaders, activists
https://www.britannica.com/video/did-you-know-Harlem-Renaissance/-253733
Page 55: Top
- 56 Libraries
Excerpt and additional content: HN
When The Right Rev. Peter Trimble Rowe died in British Columbia at age 85 in 1942, his thousands of friends and admirers in Alaska expressed surprise. His adventurous, rugged outdoorsman adventures, while Episcopal bishop in the north for nearly a half century, made him seem indestructible.
Part of his appeal was his skill as a speaker, bringing his tales of derring-do to international congregations as far away as London, England, to raise funds needed for the upkeep of churches and hospitals he established or maintained in Alaska.
In 1895, he felt called to preach in the wilds of Alaska. His first visit he journeyed over the Chilkoot Pass. When a snowslide there killed 78 men, he searched for survivors and helped dig out bodies, according to a reminiscence in The Cordova Times of December 4, 1916.
Before there were churches there were saloons. And saloon keepers such as Tex Rickard of Nome and Cy Marx of Fairbanks showed little hesitation when he volunteered to step on the sawdust floors and preach.
“It is a wonder I am alive today,” he told members of Montana dioceses at a 1924 convention in Anaconda. “In the winter we brave the cold and, in the summer, fast rivers, rapids and streams in our travels from one mission to another.”
The clergyman’s annual ministrations to his Alaska and Canada flocks brought him to remote villages and miliary outposts. He often traveled on the Yukon by motor scow (known as the Pelican) to visit prospectors and Alaska Natives.
While mainly he traveled with flour, bacon and beans for himself, reserving frozen meat and fish for his dogs, he said he accepted food including whale from Native benefactors after his grub winked out.
In 1914, he and his dogs outlasted a three-day storm at about -65 degrees by burrowing closely next to each other under the snow.
In addition to the teachings of Christ, he carried some news clippings with him. For many trappers and prospectors, their only source of election and world news was the good reverend. He also pulled teeth and did his best to serve as amateur doctor when needed. On more than one occasion, he buried trappers and prospectors he found frozen on the trail.
One time he and a pilot became lost in the air. The plane came down low and Rowe signaled that they needed directions. The Alaska Natives on the ground used their arrows to point the men to safety. Much later he learned these were Natives educated at one of Rowe’s missions.
Rowe
His stamina was impressive. He routinely traveled 2,000 miles into the Interior on snowshoes and by dogsled. He grew more ambitious as transportation methods improved in a more modern age. One year, by air, sea, and dogsled, he estimated he traveled 11,000 miles throughout the state. Near Point Barrow on a distant, icy trail, he made the acquaintance of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his party.
One of his hallmarks was the construction, often with his own hands, of hospitals across Alaska. He created St. Matthews Hospital in Fairbanks in 1904, and it served the community for 15 years.
In response, St. Matthew’s Mission in Fairbanks, established in 1904, began to provide reading materials for the public and to operate a 24-hour reading room. Magazines and newspapers donated by Episcopal parishes throughout the United States were given away, mailed upon request.
In 1909, Mr. George C. Thomas, a layman interested in the Church’s missionary work, donated money to construct a library building, and pledged $1,000 yearly for three years to maintain the building. Although Thomas never came to Alaska, in fact he died before the building was completed, the Board of Trustees decided unanimously to call the new library the George C. Thomas Memorial Library. The formal opening was Thursday evening, August 5, 1909,
Lesson Plan: January 30, 2025
Current events:
- Fiery crash of an American Airlines plane with Army helicopter under investigation. President Trump prematurely criticizes air traffic controllers. 67 persons died.
- After extensive firings of government investigators related to the past Trump Jan. 6 (and other) criminal investigations, all federal workers are offered a buyout option.
- The confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard are underway.
Kennedy is President Donald Trump’s pick for secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Gabbard is Pres. Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence.
Baran notes: Chapter Three: Books past and present
- On February 23, 1455, the Gutenberg Bible was published in Mainz, Germany. It was the first European book published on a printing press. This is arguably the most significant innovation of the fifteenth century. The production of thousands of separate pieces of type allowed printers to build up words, then sentences, then pages of text, then to print many copies from them.
Need to know:
Top of page 50 in Baran: (You can skip P. 50 introduction)
50 bottom. How books became a mass medium with beginnings with the German printer Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type. First European publishing: the Bible. Main audience, priests and monks at first.
51 Likewise, the first printed books in pamphlets in American colonies were meant for religious reasons. Printing was then censored and approved by colonial governors.
The antecedents of what would become copyright emerged in Continental Europe and England as a governmental response to the appearance of the printing press.3 The press was seen both as an important public resource and as posing a significant danger to established political and religious powers. Governmental reaction to it was shaped by three related purposes: suppression and censorship of content; maintaining an ordered and well regulated book trade; and public encouragement of publication projects deemed worthy or important. In the American colonies too, copyright emerged as part of a governmental response to the threat and promise of the printing press.
The first printing press in the North American British colonies arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the end of 1638. The moving force behind the arrival of the press was the Reverend Jose Glover, a Puritan minister and the son of a wealthy shipping merchant family. Discussion: blowback against British government in 1700s.
The Times Produce Book Authors: Thomas Paine
Best seller: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Sold about 400,000 and reached a pass-along audience of far more people.
What to know about Paine’s Common Sense and other fiery documents (1776-1783. Views are Payne’s.
- “Government’s purpose was to serve the people”.
- “America [is] the home of the free”.
- Paine’s argument for colonial self-rule: British rule was responsible for nearly every problem in colonial society”.
- Hence: “Paine championed: (1) independence from England and (2) the creation of a democratic republic”.
Thomas Paine: POST REVOLUTIONARY WAR
Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason for his writing opposing the execution of King Louis XVI on December 28, 1793.
In 1793, following a show trial, Louis XVI is executed. In October of the same year Marie Antoinette is brought before the court. The sentence was already clear before the trial began, the death sentence.
Paine was held in Luxembourg Prison until November 1794, when he was released by pleas from James Monroe, the American ambassador to France.
Little known facts: In 1796, Paine published a bitter open letter to his former friend George Washington whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite.
In Conclusion: Paine wrote this about Washington:
If there is sense enough left in the heart to call a blush into the cheek, the Washington administration must be ashamed to appear.———And as to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?
52-53 Baran: Linotype for newspapers, pagazines, books.
Above: Linotype at Cordova, Alaska Museum
Highlights of Books in America: Mark Twain:
Twain’s witty quotes condemned foolishness by government officials.Twain unafraid to criticize the government but also to praise it when deserved. He said America should be run by consent of the governed.
Contemporary author Tom Wolfe dressed like Twain. Vonnegut emulated Twain’s appearance.
That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.
– Twain, A Tramp Abroad
______________________________________
Jan. 28th: Update: Trump administration and Afghanistan after Biden: bounties
History: Atomic weapons and the Trinity test
A nuclear bomb test is a detonation of a nuclear weapon for the purpose of testing its effects and design. The first nuclear bomb test was the Trinity test, which took place on July 16, 1945 at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico.
Hiroshima:
History space race
2024: Putin’s testing and Russian assurances to the world.
2025: US nuclear power is another uncertainty as new administration takes offices.
DeepSeek artificial intelligence stunnerToday: AI race. https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/what-is-deepseek-why-is-it-disrupting-ai-sector-2025-01-27/
2025 NFL American Super Bowl. Philadelphia vs. (GRR) Kansas City
WHO and CDC
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/cdc-ordered-stop-working-who-immediately-white-house
Discussion: How does this effect UAF arctic research?
Confusion over grants: https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-house-budget-office-suspends-federal-financial-aid/story?id=118167742
Student aid. Uncertainty ended today, Jan. 28, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education said in a statement on Tuesday morning that the memo sent to government agencies the day before calling for a broad pause on federal spending did not apply to federal student loans or Pell grants. That money will continue to flow, the statement said.
DATES TO KNOW
1974 Internet emerges (about 1995, worldwide web)
2004 Facebook (META) begins
Discussing reading from Chapter Two, Part One. Convergence and Audiences, pp. 30-37, Baran textbook
Spotify or apple for music. P. 33
Music album sales have been declining since the 21st century. The decline is due to a number of factors, including the rise of streaming services, the popularity of online piracy, and the shift in consumer habits.
Factors contributing to the decline
- Streaming services
The rise of streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube has made it easier for consumers to listen to music without buying albums.
- Online piracy
The availability of high-speed internet and cheap CD-burning hardware has made it easier for people to illegally copy and share music.
- Consumer habits
The shift in consumer habits has led to a decrease in demand for physical albums.
- Record labels
Some record labels have been reluctant to issue CDs.
- Cost of living
The rising cost of living has made it more difficult for consumers to afford physical albums.
Impact on the music industry
- The decline in album sales has led to artists relying more on touring for income.
- The decline in album sales has also led to a shift in how albums are produced and released.
The success of audio streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music might suggest otherwise, but physical media is still relevant to today’s music fans. Data from Luminate shows that in 2023, U.S. consumer bought 105 million albums. 87 million were physical versions of newer and older releases by artists like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Travis Scott or K-pop acts Stray Kids and Tomorrow x Together.
As our album sales timeline shows, the downward trend of album sales has halted – for now.
In 2007, half a billion albums were sold in the U.S., either on physical mediums like CD or vinyl or via digital downloads. A year prior, Spotify launched its service in its home country Sweden, rolling out its services in additional markets like the United Kingdom and the United States in 2009 and 2011 respectively. While physical album sales and digital album downloads had already dropped to 331 million in 2011, the decline of album sales accelerated for the remainder of the 2010s. Between 2012 and 2022, album sales fell by 70 percent.
Discussion: Compare audiences for books, newspapers, music, games, etc. What are audiences by definition?
Radio: Job Market collapsed: discussion
Local TV: Fairbanks. Discontinued by Gray in Nov. 2024. What happened to Fairbanks TV news?
Interior Alaska is losing its last local television newscast, as the corporate owner of NewsCenter Fairbanks downsizes its news operation and lays off employees. KTVF Channel 11 and KXDF Channel 13, known together as NewsCenter Fairbanks, are collectively owned by Gray TV/Gray Media, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Local Newspapers: Rising costs threaten existence. Bigger corporations like Gannett or Gray buy them up.
READ PAGE 37 closely
Class discussion: conglomerates
Discuss: concentration of ownership
1997: Rupert Murdoch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzXqALTJ8Go
On June 28, 2012, after concerns from shareholders in response to its recent scandals and to “unlock even greater long-term shareholder value”, founder Rupert Murdoch announced that News Corporation’s assets would be split into two publicly traded companies,[8] one oriented towards media, and the other towards publishing. The formal split was completed on June 28, 2013; the original News Corp. was renamed 21st Century Fox (now known as Fox Corporation) and consisted primarily of media outlets, while the second News Corporation was formed to take on the publishing and Australian broadcasting assets.
Lecture notes from Jan. 24: Know these current events.
- President’s banning of birthright
- Name change battle: Gulf of Mexico, Mount Denali
- Confirmation of Pete Hegseth (Tie broken by VP Vance–only twice in history)
- Sanctuary police and Trump edict allowing ICE to search schools and churches
- U.s. Pullout from Afghanistan during Biden administration. Pres. Trump’s policy on refugees and deportations
Chapter Two Discussion:
How viewing habits have changed: First movie you remember seeing?
–20 and 21 Century: From lavish Movie Palaces to Netflix
–Have we lost anything socially if we stop going to community theaters?
1950 Television displaces Radio
1955-2025. Evolution of Mickey Mouse Club. Family TV viewing habits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYHnbQWkyDw
Assignment: Read Baran’s textbook Chapter One, part two, pages_ 12_28 for January 23:
Study Guide: Current Events, Journalism 101, Jan. 21, 2025 for reading by January 23, 2025.
This study guide is intended to help you understand the accompanying class lecture and material. You do not have to turn this in to the instructor. But if you have a question, by all means email him. Save your answers to study in advance for quizzes and the midterm and final exams.
Consider what has beem President Biden’s legacy: Know his main accomplishments and failure to smoothly remove US troops out of Afghanistan. First 3 minutes below in news clip.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-legacy-1a4498e8cd5f764e92e73412d9dfefaa
President Trump suspends all foreign aid for 90 days: https://apnews.com/article/trump-foreign-aid-9f5336e84c45a6e782fa95f60a919f47
Ohio State wins national championship: – https://www.espn.com/college-football/
Gaza truce holds for now
https://apnews.com/article/mideast-ceasefire-gaza-return-home-3942d995e85f0d33539c6625b2cd1ee5
Chapter One: Mass Communication, Part Two, P. 12 to end of chapter
P. 13: Definition: What is nationalism? identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.
Thought question: How do the new President Trump goals on border closings and expelling immigrants tie in with the concept of nationalism? Video for background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5b7OXmOUY
The Alaskan mountain now known as Denali had been unofficially named Mount McKinley in 1896 by a gold prospector, and officially by the federal government in 1917 to commemorate William McKinley, who was President of the United States from 1897 until his assassination in 1901.
Important: Understand Paragraph 3 from the top, p. 14. Namely, what is culture. Stop at 1:50 second mark.
Link: what is culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB7WwENGOgw
Sub-cultures. Alaska: land of many cultures, pp. 13-14. How many sub-cultures can you name off the top of your head?
Important: The role of story tellers: the traditional news sources.
Question: How are influencers “influencing” what and how people believe? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/beware-the-bad-influencer-effect
Pages 16-17. Read carefully the role of technology with regard to how the world communicates.
Look at recent news about Tik-Tok and Trump, the use of AI in view of your reading in the Baran textbook, pages 16-17
Read p. 17, The Use of Money. Names to know in 2025: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerburg. What influence will billionaires have in the Trump cabinet, do you think? Link below:
Name to know: Johannes Gutenberg, pp 19-20. How was this as important as the industrial revolution and today’s technology revolution?
Most important to study: Media Literacy, pages 21-25.
Focus: The need to make independent judgments about media content.
Read on your own: examples of media bias: link
Concentrate on the role of the Supreme Court and the removal of Native Americans from their lands.
Definitions: multiple points of access, p. 22; third-person effect, p. 23; genre, p. 24; hostile media effect, fake news, sources and citations, p. 24; production values. P. 25
Review: p. 26. Think about questions for quizzes and midterm. Namely QUESTIONS IN REVIEW, p. 26.
Review: This is the work we have gone over in class on January 14 & 16.
We have taken a look at current events such as Boar’s Head ten deaths from listeria, the Los Angeles fires, the Nike freefall in sales in 2024 due to a lack of innovation and a shift to using an ordinary person in a 60-second commercial instead of a Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, the Hamas-Israel proposed truce, new research seeking more health warnings on alcohol due to cancer connection theory.
We have looked at these past current events in context: The Jungle, the Iraq weapons of destruction misinformation and propaganda, the VW “defeat device” coverup, the Red Bull lawsuit settlement, college football national championship.
You are aware of terms to define such as mass communication, message, Lasswell and propaganda, message, interpersonal communication, encoded and decoded, communication, culture, medium, dominant culture or mainstream culture, Carey’s cultural definition of communication from Chapter One, Baran textbook, pages 4-11.
We have examined these newsmakers: Nike’s Phil Knight and former St. John’s University soccer coach and activist Jim Keady, Walt Disney, Judith Miller of the New York Times, Martin Mull, George W. Bush, Chuck Person, Joe Biden and the Stop Hazing federal legislation, Professor Elizabeth Allan, inauguration of Donald Trump, Upton Sinclair.
We have gone over Lasswell’s Model of communication.
We have discussed how a news interviewer is involved with coded and decoded material that occurred during an interview. Basically, for our limited puposes, in an interview we have the questions that are asked. The actions, planned and unplanned, that take place during questioning involving the interviewed and interviewers, the putting of symbols into a word document (news story) and the selection of which words to include, and any video (if any) which puts those words info a film/video that is meant to be seen and heard.
We have examined how Disney is part of the American culture. You should be able to define culture now in your own words as “shared experience.”
We have looked at messages in advertisements and commercials and what the difference is between a news slant and editorializing or bias in a story.
We have looked in detail at propaganda. How the U.S. government used. propaganda made by Disney to inluence and to persuade the American people to take action. We looked at Hitler’s use of propaganda. We looked at how misinformation during the George W. Bush presidency led to his acknowledgment (NOT apology) that the U.S. located no weapons of mass destruction. Bush’s obsession with Iraq’s late leader Saddam Hussein.
We have studied this: Definition: Interpersonal communication is the exchange of information between people, both verbally and non-verbally. It’s a key part of building relationships and can be used in many settings, including the workplace and in personal life.
Revised: Homework assignment for Jan. 21, 2025: Allow 90 minutes to two hours for this assignment. Do all items. Don’t skip. Save your answers for quizzes and exams to review as notes.
Study Guide: Week One of the Course.
Read all with study help below.
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- Listen to short Podcast from Professor Elizabeth Allan of the University of Maine. Open the “The Maine Question” at https://umaine.edu/news/blog/2025/01/13/the-maine-question-explores-hazing-on-campus-and-beyond/
What’s happening in this podcast? Why is it newsworthy? For the first time in history, Congress and President Biden passed a FEDERAL law requiring colleges to report hazing.
Note: This was taped before Biden actually signed the bill. The bill first was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and then by the U.S. Senate.
As you listen to this Jan. 13, answer these questions.
Who is Elizabeth Allan and why is she important in terms of this bill? Why did she get involved in a lifetime committed to stopping student deaths?
Why did the government think a bill was needed to be passed against hazing?
What groups haze?
What part does alcohol seem to play in hazing deaths 2000-2025? https://www.hanknuwer.com/hazing-destroying-young-lives/
Do hazing laws vary by state? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuQoPw9PTQM
Should Alaska pass a hazing law? Why or why not? It is one of 6 states withoout a hazing law.
- Current events: In the world of sports, what two college football teams will meet for a national championship? https://www.espn.com/college-football/
Will this game attract a wide audience? What advertisers are likely to put out ads for millions of dollars to send messages and get viewers/listeners to buy their products? Will individual college players get a financial reward if they star in this game?
Instructor suggestion: Next perform the hardest part of the Assignment: namely, the reading–Baran, pages 4-11
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- Either use a “Reading Notebook” or create an “Online Reading Notes” FOLDER. Date each entry. Label today’s homework assignment “Chapter One, Part One, January 14-15, 2025.”
- What will I be learning? Answer: I am learning some definitions about Mass Communication. In other words, I am learning how information is given or shared to me by mass media.
- Example: a new study says there is a strong correlation between drinking various kinds of alcohol and the long-term bad effect of alcohol. How will a newspaper share this information? How might a TV news program decide to do a segment on alcohol and cancer? Is it likely that millions of Americans will receive this message today, tomorrow, and in the next week?
- Read pages 4-7 very carefully. You will be asked to memorize terms.
Don’t spend too much time on p. 8. Read top of p. 9 carefully.
Carefully read pages 10 and 11.
Page 4.
Understand that communication involves a message. That message comes from a source. That message is read and understood by a receiver. Example: A team of researchers say alcohol drinking may cause cancer. What sources might reach you personally via social media?
What feedback might Americans give to this message? Will all Americans react to that alcohol warning the same?
Students discuss alcohol use: Is peer-to-peer messaging a form of communication? Explain.
Other words to know and look up early in this chapter: interpersonal communication. This means what? Such communication can be verbal or not (like a shrug or lifted eyebrow in disapproval).
What are examples of MASS COMMUNICATION?
What is an example of a mass medium? (Plural is mass media)
How does advertising play a role in messages you get from newspapers, radio, TV, and web news sites?
Think of something you learned this week from the mass media. Something from the news or from a sports program. Who said it? What did they say? What was the mass media that gave the message? Who besides you got that same message? What effect, if any, did that message have on you and others?
- Write out a definition of COMMUNICATION.
- Howard Laswell teaches us to ask 5 questions. They are: 1) __ 2) ___. 3) ____. 4) ____ 5) ______
- Communication requires SHARING of some words that have MEANING. Give an example.
- What is feedback?
You receive a message from a mass media like a news show or sports news program. How might viewers or listeners respond to that message?
- Study the two graphic illustrations on page 5. They are marked FIGURE 1.1 and FIGURE 1.2
PP 5-6. Be able to define INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION.
- 6 What does it mean if a message is encoded or decoded?
Hint:
Differences between encoding and decoding involve the following: Encoding is essentially a writing process, whereas decoding is a reading process. Encoding breaks a spoken word down into parts that are written or spelled out, while decoding breaks a written word into parts that are verbally spoken.
- Study Figure 1.3 on page 6 to understand Schramm’s Model of Communication. Imagine how Fox News and ESPN might differently announce how Mike McCarthy lost his job in Dallas.In what ways might Dallas Cowboys fans react to the announcement? What response might someone give who knows nothing about football?
Important for sure. Be able to define MASS COMMUNICATION
- Give or look up the meaning of RECIPROCAL. Give an example of reciprocal.
- Sometimes feedback is immediate or almost immediate. (A message gets to you that the neighborhood is on fire and you have to evacuate).
Sometimes feedback is delayed. A new TV comedy series comes out.
How will ratings determine if advertisers will continue to sponsor a show? How do ratings decide if a show continues or is shut down? https://www.tvinsider.com/gallery/new-fall-2024-shows-renewed-canceled-ratings/
How did you learn the results of the national election for president and vice president? What media or medium did you go to first to hear or learn the results?
How (p. 7) is it reality for you that a presidential candidate won or lost? Now apply what you know to James W. Carey’s CULTURAL DEFINITION OF COMMUNICATION.
- 7. Answer this: WHAT IS CULTURE?
How might the culture of a small Alaska village be the same as the culture of a downtown Fairbanks apartment complex? How might it be different?
- How is inviting a friend for coffee a form of interpersonal communication?
- What does it mean for a CULTURE to have SHARED meaning?
- Bravo. You did the work. Now review and test yourself.
Review each term below. Go back to the reading if you still don’t understand a term.
Know all these terms.
Communication and mass communication
Feedback
Encoding and decoding
Medium and media
Mass media
Congratulations. You did it. See you in class.