Assignment:
Discussion 1
"Two way" conversation has changed the roles of news media by making the media think harder on ways to capture their audience. Consumers have taken the power from the traditional news media. "Personal two-way media devices such as smartphones and tablets give consumers the ability to connect directly with each other." (Husni, Wegner & Price, 2016). This new technology had made it easier for the consumer to get the stories first or make it where they get the news story before it hits any kind of news station. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, news media has to take nontraditional routes to gain power back from the consumers.
The consumers ability to generate news media content impacted the roles of mainstream news media because it made it change the way they had to do things. Consumers redefined the way that everything had to be done especially with the rise in technology that allowed consumers to be there first to get news stories, have everything that they needed immediately from their phone, and the ability to talk to each other about it as soon as it happened on Facebook and other forms of social media.
The news media has taken the information that they have learned from the consumers and social media and used it to create User Generated Content (UGC). This way they can use the information provided by the consumers in their news stories. The most popular UGC is CNN's iReport, where consumers load stories that they think are important and load them to the website.
Resource
Price, H., Husni, S. A., & Halpern Wenger, D.R. (Eds.). (2016). Managing today's news media: Audience first. Los Angeles, CA: CQ Press.
Discussion 2
Consumer choice of news outlets and the ability to write their own news has taken the power away from the traditional news model. The audiences are fractured and the new role and responsibility of the mainstream media is to do research to identify their audience, know their audiences' persona, and build a relationship with them (Price, Husni, & Wenger, 2016).
In much the same way that the media holds government accountable by examining and bringing to light what is happening, consumers of traditional media now communicate with the news outlets and hold them accountable. Gone are the days of editors deciding what news they wanted to put forth in a top-down model that was sometimes used for agenda-setting. For instance, research on the media habits of college students, found that most were not interested in politics, did not read the political articles, and that 60 percent said they prefer print publications. (Hedrick, 2015). That would mean that they would not be interested in Fox News. The role and responsibility of the Fox News management is to find a way to entice young people to their site since the young are the news consumers of the future.
The empowerment of the consumer seems to have put them in the driver's seat and media companies may simply ask what their customers want and try to provide it instead of meeting their responsibility to see that Americans are informed citizens.
References.
Hedrick, J., (2015). Do College Students Want to see Political News in Their Newspaper? College Media Review. Jacksonville State University.
Price, H., Husni, S. A., & Halpern Wenger, D.R. (Eds.). (2016). Managing today's news media: Audience first. Los Angeles, CA: CQ Press.