Blog Assignment #1

J203 Assignment #1:
Pick a popular news story and find at least three forms of media (i.e. Website (print), Podcast (audio), and MPEG (video)) that are disseminating the story. Write a one-page analysis of the pros and cons of each medium.


For this assignment I chose a story that is making headlines nationwide, and will undoubtedly affect the lives of millions of consumers. The below freezing temperatures in California are destroying a huge amount of citrus fruits that include oranges and lemons. The damages are going to cost the fruit industry hundreds of millions of dollars, and prices on these fruits are already flaring up at supermarkets across the country. I analyzed this story from three different perspectives: The NBC Nightly News, a New York Times Podcast over itunes, and an article from cnn.com. Each medium had its own set of advantages and disadvantages when it came to channeling this particular nationwide story.
The NBC Nightly News gave this story decent coverage. NBC only has about twenty minutes to discuss the nations top stories, so every sentence of script needs to be clear, concise and to the point. The story about the loss of citrus fruits was intertwined with another weather related story about the horrible ice accumulation in areas such as Oklahoma, where there is no electricity. Obviously the largest advantage of television news is the ability to show visuals for the story. NBC showed clips of orange trees that are completely frozen over. Visuals such as these enhanced my understanding for what was going on. NBC also showed a segment of an interview with one of the men who is in charge of the citrus fruit industry. NBC’s credibility is boosted when they allow the experts to comment on the story at hand. This story is fairly important for consumers, but it isn’t the type of news that people need to be immediately warned about. If people haven’t heard about the crisis, they will know something is wrong when they realize how expensive fruit is at supermarkets in the upcoming months. One downside to running this story on television is that the visuals are not all that interesting, and most people would probably prefer more in depth coverage of the story instead of a lot of visuals. NBC was simply unable cover the story thoroughly with the allotted time frame.
The article on CNN covered the story very well. The article, titled “Freeze kills $480 million Worth of Citrus” was fairly long, and included concrete facts that NBC, along with the Podcast were unable to mention. The article confidently stated that 480 million dollars worth of fruit had been destroyed. The other mediums provided vague numbers such as “hundreds of millions.” The article was also able to raise their credibility by quoting experts on the subject. While they didn’t physically show the man who was speaking on behalf of the citrus industry, they did introduce him and briefly list his credentials in the field. One aspect of the print article that clearly separated it from the rest was the use of citrus industry statistics from previous years. The current crisis was compared to a similar fruit crisis that took place in 1998. This inclusion allows the reader to effectively gauge how bad the fruit crisis really is. The way that America handled the crisis in 1998 is a good indicator of what is going to need to happen in order for the current situation to be resolved. For this story, the print medium is far superior to the others.
The Podcast from the New York Times was a good medium for helping make people aware of the story at hand, but the coverage was lacking in depth. This particular Podcast basically summarized the news from the front page of the New York Times. Overall, the Podcast sounded like a script from television news, but did not include any visuals. The brevity of the story, along with the lack of any visualization made the Podcast medium the weakest of the three. One redeeming value of the Podcast is that the listener is forced to listen to the story at hand, because that is all there is to do. There are no visuals to distract the viewer. Overall, Podcasts and radio news are most likely best suited for breaking news that needs to get out to people by any means necessary.