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Surveillance
Primarily the journalism function of mass communication, which provides information about the processes, issues, events, and other developments in society.
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Correlation
The ways in which media interprets events and issues and ascribes meanings that help individuals understand their roles within the larger society and culture.
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Cultural transmission
The transference of the dominant culture, as well as its subcultures, from one generation to the next or to immigrants, which helps people learn how to fit into society.
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Pseudo events
An event that is created specifically to attract the attention of the media, particularly the news.
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Soft news day
A day in which not much of importance happens, so that editors are more likely to add features with less real news value, such as human-interest stories.
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Penny press
Newspapers that sold for a penny, making them accessible to everyone. They differed from older newspaper forms in that they tried to attract as large an audience as possible and were supported by advertising rather than subscriptions.
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James Gordon Bennett
Founder of the New York Herald in 1835. He started many features found in modern newspapers,including a financial page, editorial commentary, and public affairs reporting.
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Objectivity
A journalistic principle that says journalists should be impartial and free of bias in their reporting. This principle has come under attack in recent years, because of the impossibility of people being completely objective, and has largely been replaced by the concepts of fairness and balance.
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Associated Press
Founded as a not-for-profit members’ cooperative in 1848 by a group of six New York newspaper publishers in order to share the costs of gathering news by telegraph. Today 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 television and radio stations are members of this news-gathering organization.
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Mary Shadd Cary
The first African American woman to edit a weekly newspaper. She founded and edited the Provincial Freeman in Canada after leaving the United States so she would not be captured and put into slavery because of the Fugitive Slave Act.
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Ida B. Wells
A females African American journalist in the latter nineteenth century who wrote and fought against racism and black lynching
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Sensational journalism
News that exaggerates or features lurid details and depictions of events in order to get a larger audience.
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Yellow Journalism
A style of journalism practiced especially by publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst during the late 1890’s in which stories were sensationalized and often partly or wholly made up in order to be more dramatic.
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Muckrakers
A group of journalists in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who investigated business and political corruption. Their activities were likened to raking up mud, or muck, by Theodore Roosevelt, who meant it as a term of derision.
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Edward R. Murrow
A radio and, later, television journalist and announcer who set the standard for journalistic excellence on television during television’s golden age.
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Electronic news-gathering (ENG) equipment
Tools such as video cameras and satellite dishes that allow journalists to gather and broadcast news much more quickly than in the past.
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Fairness
In news coverage, the concept of covering all relevant sides of an issue and allowing spokespeople representing those various sides a chance to be covered in the same way.
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Balance
In news coverage, the concept of presenting sides equally or of reporting on a broad range of news events.
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Frame
The notion that every story is told in a particular way that influences how readers think of the story.
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News hold
A term typically used with newspapers, it refers to the amount of total space available after advertisement space has been blocked out.
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Beat
A reporter’s specialized area of coverage based on geography or subject. Common beats in large or medium-sized newspapers include education, crime, and state politics.
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Crowd sourcing
Utilizing raw data that the public has gathered, in addition to reports from citizen journalists, to help create a news report.
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Interpretive reporting
A type of reporting that tries to put the facts of a story into a broader context by relying on knowledge and experience the reporter has about the subject.
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Embargo
The practice of sending news releases to new organizations with the stipulation that the information cannot be broadcast or print until after a specific day or time.
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Slashdot effect
Theoccurrence of a website’s servers crashing because of a large increase in visits to the site after its being mentioned on the popular website Slashdot.org
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Mash-up
Combining textual information over geographic, map-based information so users can access multiple layers of data.
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Media spotlight effect
The phenomenon that occurs when the media has intense coverage of a certain event or person for a short time, but then moves on to other issues soon after.
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News hole
Typically used with newspapers, it is the amount of total space available after advertisement space has been blocked out
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Rhetoric
One of the ancient arts of discourse, it involves using language to persuade others.
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Theory of cognitive dissonance
A theory of persuasion that states we act first and then rationalize our behavior afterward in order to fit our actions into self-perceived notions of who we are.
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Direct effects model
A model of mass communication that says that media has direct and measurable effects upon audiences, such as encouraging them to buy products or become violent.
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Advertising
an ancient form of human communication generally designed to inform or persuade members of the public with regard to some product or service
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Rating
Used in broadcast media to explain the number of households that watched a particular show.
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Performance-based advertising
Any form of online ad buying in which an advertiser pays for results rather than paying for the size of the publisher’s audience, or CPM
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Search engine marketing
Paying for certain key words in order to show up high in rankings in search engines such as Google or Bing.
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Ad-agency commission
A percent amount of the cost of an advertisement that is taken by the advertising agency that helped create and sell the ad.
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Infomercial
Also called paid programming, this is a thirty- or sixty- minute television show that seeks to sell a product and that usually involves a celebrity spokesperson and testimony from customers about how good the product is.
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Fairness doctrine
Adopted by the FCC in 1969, it required broadcasters to seek out and present all sides of a controversial issue they were covering. It was discarded by the FCC in 1987.
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Branding
The process of creating in the consumer’s mind a clear identity for a particular company’s product, logo, or trademark.
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Social marketing
The practice of using advertising and marketing techniques to persuade people about changing bad or destructive be behaviors or adopting good behaviors.
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Public information campaign
Media program funded by the government and designed to achieve some social goal, or what might be called social engineering.
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Fear appeals
A type of advertising technique that attempts to scare the audience in order to persuade them, such as anti-smoking ads that show disfigured former smokers.
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Advertorial
A type of display advertisement that is created to look like an article within the publication, although most publications have the words “advertisement” or “paid advertisement” in tiny print somewhere nearby.
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Viral marketing
Spreading news and information about media content through word of mouth, usually via online discussion groups, chats, and email, without utilizing traditional advertising and marketing methods.
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Press agentry
The practice of getting media attention for a client, often by creating outrageous stunts that would attract journalists.
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Positivism
The belief, common among scientists in the physical or natural sciences and many in the social sciences, that there is an objective reality that can be discovered and explained through rigorous scientific research.
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Epistemology
A way of or framework for understanding the world.
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Postpositivism
A view that agrees largely with positivism, but acknowledges that there may be some things that we cannot know through scientific inquiry.
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Social constructionism
A view that says that much if not all of what we know and understand about the world including scientific knowledge, is constructed through our social interactions and language.
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Postmodernism
A broad category of viewpoints that claim that there is no absolute truth, that truth is unknowable, and that attempts to create grand narratives that explain the world are faulty.
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Pragmatism
A school of thought that claims that truth is found in actions that work and that no overarching or purely objective notion of truth can be found.
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Quantitative research
Research that focuses on numbers and measures and experimentation to describe phenomena. Researchers usually have a hypothesis they are trying to prove or disprove through controlled experimentation.
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Qualitative research
Research that describes phenomena in words instead of numbers or measures. Ethnographic studies, such as interviews with people to learn about beliefs or trends, are an example of qualitative research, also called critical-cultural studies.
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Ethnography
A variety of qualitative research techniques that involve the researcher interacting with participants, either through observation, participation, interviews, or a combination of methods.
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Participant-observation
A qualitative research technique in which the researcher participates as a member of the group being studied.
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Focus groups
A research technique in which small groups of people are gathered together to discuss a topic, with the interactions often recorded and carefully watched to determine what different people think.
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Semiotics
The study of signs and symbols.
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Media ecology
The study of media environments and how those environments may affect people and society.
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Hypodermic-needle model
A model of media effects, also called the “magic bullet” model, largely derived from learning theory and simple stimulus-response models in behavioral psychology, that states media messages have a profound, direct, and uniform impact on the public.
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Spiral of Silence Hypothesis
a hypothesis that states people 1. are naturally afraid of isolation 2. realize that if they are in the minority on an issue they will likely be isolated and 3. have a kind of sixth sense that helps them gauge when their opinions are contrary to the majority - which makes them refrain from expressing their opinions.
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Third-Person Effect
When a media message does not affect the behavior or beliefs of the intended audience but does affect a different group, which also receives the message and may act in the belief that the message will affect the intended audience.
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Uses-and-Gratification Research
a branch of research on media effects that looks at why people use particular media and examines what people do with the media rather than what the media do to people.
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Encoding/Decoding
a theory that says that messages are encoded with certain meanings by media producers and that audiences then “decode” the messages in various ways, depending on things like their education level, political views, and other factors.
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Critical Theory
An umbrella term for a range of theories, most of which are influenced by Marxism, which accepts to look critically at society and offer ways to make society better
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