Media Diary (Assignment One)

I tracked my media consumption for a period of ten days, and I found the results to reflect different behaviour from what I had expected. In recording my media consumption, I noted how much time was spent reading the news, watching news, watching general TV programming and time spent on the internet. I also listed time spent reading novels and playing video games, as I often learn things relevant to news and current affairs as well as learning new things from them.

Before beginning to record my media use, I had a firm idea of what I did with my time and what kind of media I used. I believed I did not spend too much time watching TV and surfing the internet, listened to the radio occasionally, played videogames infrequently, did not read novels and literature often enough and spent a lot of time reading news on my iPad. The results I saw at the end of the ten days, however, indicated that was not the case. I did not listen to music or the radio once in that period, spent far too much time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on my computer, watching TV mindlessly, wasting time looking at 9Gag and didn’t spend a lot of time reading the news. I was pretty disappointed.

This graph can also be viewed this way:

How I consumed media:

I have an iPad (like 13.7% of JOUR111 students do) and I use it every day as an internet device and e-reader. I source my news from online newspapers like 67.8% of my cohort, and I am also in the 71.1% who get their news from the TV as well. I rely on online newspapers to inform me of what’s going on, and TV news often delivers the same story later in the evening or the next morning, which expands a little on what I’ve already learned.

While the above graph shows that I spend marginally more time watching the news than reading it, I don’t think it’s reflective of how many news items I consume through each platform. It takes me much less time to read a few articles than it does to watch a segment on The Project or Sunrise. Those television programs also don’t have a lot of news stories one after the other; it’s more a simplified summary of a news, information or human interest story over a few minutes with a lot of opinion in it, rather than a ‘balanced’ report in a newspaper article.

After looking at the results from this diary, I think to better my own skills in writing and journalism, I need to spend much more time consuming news online and should probably vary my news sources more, to understand stories from multiple angles.