Media Use Diary

Before analyzing my own media usage, I'd like to talk about the media usage survey result of students of JOUR1111. I know the result isn't 100% accurate but personally I find it interesting.


Just to mention a few, first of all, there's only 6% of international student in the class and I'm one of them. I thought there's more than that. How little and I haven't spoke to anyone in the class. Always alone.
Next on, blog and twitter account before they started JOUR1111. I'm blogging & tweeting since 4 years ago, and this two thing is pretty common among my social circle so I thought it's something everyone has to have! Surprisingly, majority doesn't even have one before starting it especially when Twitter is quite a big thing around young people.While I was doing the survey, I thought I'm the majority. Turned out I'm in the 30% that owned one blog and twitter account.  Facebook, which combines everything including blog & twitter, still rule as almost 95% have one.

Back to my media use diary. 
Instead of logging 10 days continuously, I split it to half. Logged the first half from 17th March till 21st March, take a one day break, then 23rd March till 27th March. Here's an overall of my media use data.

In general, my media usage pattern wasn't in a regular pattern as it changed during weekends. One thing that I didn't realize that I was doing all the time until I log my media use is the amount of time I spent online. Apparently I spent most of my time in a day (provided that I stayed at home all day) on the internet! Beside having meals, sport games with friends, reading a book, and other minor stuff, I spent the rest of the time online. That proved that I'm truly someone from this era.


Noticed that I didn't even read a newspaper, watch the tv or even listen to the radio?
As an international student, I stayed a single room and sharing the house with 6 people. It's a really big house so everyone is comfortable with their own space. There's a TV in the house but no one's touching it unless we rent DVD and watch it together on the couch. But that only happens once in a blue moon.
Not a fan to any radio station, so I only listen to my favourite songs or play a list on Musicovery


Although I spent most of my time online, I read. Reading is still something I'd hold on to hard copy. Reading online is never going to be something I like. On average I spent about 1.5 hour a day to read. Be it bed time reading or somewhere between day time. Read 2 interesting book on the past 2 weeks which is Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer and Onstage Offstage by Michael Buble. Both are based on true story, inspiring and something that I'd love to keep it.


Back to online, I visualized the where I spent most of my time online into a graph. Although they are not equally spread, I took average of every aspect just to have a whole view on that.

As you can see I spent most of my time on music but most of the time I let it play in the background so that I can go on to Facebook, read the news and browse the website.

Having a smartphone and an iPad, I get online very frequently. Whenever I feel of knowing something, I'll get it online and it is just one click away. The apps on iPad made accessing to news even more convenient. Just subscribe to any of your favourite news agencies, it sums up the news daily and even rank it with popularity!

Apparently my source of news are fully online. I do keep a habit of reading news online when I wake up or before I go to bed. My must-visit sites are Bloomberg, TIME, Brisbane Times, Sinchew-i, Twitter and Flipboard app in my iPad. Although I don't read the newspaper, I'm well-informed with all the major news.24th of March is the Queensland State Election 2012, but I paid some attention of what's going on even though I am not a resident here.

From the graph, I spent most of the time browsing the web. Carrying a motto 'Learn something new everyday' made me curious about everything. That's why I love to go around the web to learn new things. From astronomy to zoology, the internet is definitely something to satisfy my curiosity. Just to name a few, most of the time are spent on Googling, Youtubing and blog hopping!

Beside music, my life is inseparable with movies. I don't know about other but I watch movie almost everyday. The sources are either online or rent it from somewhere else. On the past Monday & Tuesday, I don't have to go to class so I spent long hours on catching up with the drama - New Girls because I heard that it's nice and rewatched some cheesy romantic comedy. 

Come to the king of social network. When I first started with Facebook, I'm so addicted to it and I spent more than 3 hours on it just to wonder around and make sure I'm updated with every single news. Growing up, my Facebook friends grew from less than 100 to 1700. As time past I realized how childish I was and also understand that the irrelevance of being informed with acquaintances' news. I still check Facebook regularly on daily basis but what I do on it is just to upload some photos, check my notifications, chat with my friends and get updated with people that I love. I'm glad that Facebook allows us to bookmark who is our close friends and family. Other than that, I'll just ignore or maybe click a 'like' if it is interesting.

Internet is definitely a big source of content and it's slowly replacing the old media. I always read news about how bad the printing media is doing and the trend of moving to online. Even Encyclopaedia Britannica stops printing encyclopedia and goes online as now people don't keep a space-consuming hard copy at home! Everything is available on the internet and it takes no space!

This assessment is not difficult but the result is surprisingly interesting. Not only it pointed out how relying I am to the internet, it also made me realize how close I am to these media. Doesn't matter if I get out of the house or not, I can hardly survive one day without getting in touch with news and people out there.

It also clearly shown that my ambition of being a journalist. From the habit of getting in touch of news daily, I love to be informed with facts and hope one day I can be one of them that brings out the true story to the people. 

Week 3 Lecture

We had Skye Doherty as our guest lecture on L3. Topic is TEXT. 

I learned that she is an editor, digital producer and media consultant. She focused on news journalism and how to take news to people.

Although this lecture's content is pretty straight forward,  to me, it is fruitful. I took away a lot of important stuff. How a journalist can excel without writing a great and influencing article? Or at least, a sentence that catches people’s interest. I always know how important text is in journalism because to build a career in this business, you have to be really good at it.  

First she told us how amazing text is because it is portable, controllable, can modify it anywhere and anytime. Also, a journalist must be aware of the news value. Then this 'Inverted Pyramid' theory that I'm getting familiar with came up again.

It’s important to know how to craft words. Although in publishing news, a photo does help a lot. By crafting the words may affect readers' view and change perspective of public towards a certain issues if your article is powerful enough. Text is significant in publishing. She said we have to be good in using vocabulary.

“Headline writing is an art.” She talked about how can an interesting headline captivates reader. It doesn’t need to have puns but it has to be true and correct. One of the biggest advantage on online media is you get to search articles by typing keywords into the search engine.

Tag your article with correct keywords and come out with a beautiful headline. Also, she spoke on how headline may changes according to the media. I'm following couple of news agencies on Twitter and also Facebook, if the headline isn't appealing, I'll just ignore it. 

I didn't realize there's difference between headline formats on these online media, from that day on, I paid attention to the same news on Facebook.

She also compared the difference of the articles of same issues on printed media and online media.As there's limited space on newspaper, the editor has to choose carefully which news to be published on main pages and also the size of the column whereas the unlimited space online allows to put any news on it. Online news is broad and has higher accessibility as they have these bullets that link to other related stories.

She showed an article from TheSun online and talked about how informative an article should be at the first paragraph to tell the whole story efficiently. Then gets into more detail in the rest of the article. Usually you get information of the 5 Wifes (Who, What When, Where and Why) and 1 Husband (How).

  

Honestly, after this lecture I felt more insecure than ever as I don't know how to play with words (or craft it), and shoot a captivating headline. Through blogging on my personal blog, I realize my weakness is to summarize the article and give it a beautiful title. Gotta work harder!

Lecture 1 Introduction

I always feel great on the first week of each semester. After a long eventful summer break, I can't wait for the classes to start! New faces, new course and so many new things to be learnt.

My first lecture of this semester is JOUR1111. As mentioned in my first post, this is my elective. Apart from my major, this is definitely something new and exciting to me. 2pm lecture is in Forgan Smith building, talked to a girl when I reached there and she said she had a hard time finding this place. Lucky for me, I attended Corporate Finance lecture last semester in the same lecture hall so I got familiar.

Our lecturer is Dr Bruce Redman. This quote kinda printed into my mind when he showed it to us. 

Am I? I don't find myself fit into this quote. Hopefully by the time I done this course I'll feel more towards it.

Yes. People expect it to be true. I come from a country where freedom of speech is something worth to be questioned. With politic parties controlling major media, resident have limited access to what it is really going on. 

But, how can you call yourself a journalist where everything you write will be monitored?

I always know that journalist is a mighty job. War journalist, travel journalist, business journalist, fashion journalist, and many more,countless field. Even the paparazzi is one of them. Being a journalist you have to write about the truth from your perspective. Some of them risk their life to photograph events and some risk the chance of getting arrested of revealing the truth. Everything they do is to get things out to the world for readers to see. 

What I think after lecture 1? This course is going to be fun!

45 mins with J.P. Morgan

As a finance major, I often come across article with data base on research from J.P. Morgan. It gave me an impression of they are a firm that do a lot of research and very influential in this business.
Also, people who works with them are elites and proud of who they work for.

Beg my pardon, I had no idea what they are doing before this. An investment bank? Consultant? Not a single clue.
*feeling guilty for not knowing what they do even though I'm aware that they're in this business for more than 200 years*

I didn't know there's an evening talk in campus from J.P. Morgan at Innes Room until an hour before it started. I was having coffee with my friend Liza and she mentioned that to me and invited me to go with her. I felt the chill in my back when I arrived. Everyone was in office wear and they looked so professional. Suddenly I filled with guilt for not knowing what they actually do. Like frog in the well.
We're given a stack of empty cards to fill in our names & contact details for networking purpose and an information booklet with this line "Our success depends on our people." Well said as human resources is the most important asset in a company.

Reading through the booklet I learned that they have different division - Investment Banking, Sales & Trading, Research, IB Risk, Private Banking, Treasury & Securities Services, Operations, Technology, lastly, Finance. I carefully read through the short introduction of every division and see where I'm interested with.

Before it started, a tall, suited-up man walked towards us and naturally we formed a circle. Slowly, this circle grew bigger as there're more people joined in. From the conversation, questions were asked and answered accordingly. He also shared his working experience and how we should be to fit in this competitive environment.

Not long after that, a smart and young woman got our attention. If I'm not wrong, she works in the HR department. That moment, I realized how packed the room was as there were just few of us when we arrived.
After a short introduction of the purpose of gathering everyone around, she introduced the Vice President of the Investment Bank division to give us a short speech. This is the guy that we've talked to. No wonder he seemed confident with what he was talking.


One professional from each division stood in designated corner to interact with us after the short speech.
We just have to gather around at the corner of the division that we're interested in and get to know more about that.
I asked a question that I've been wondering all the time.
"How did you start a research or studies? What drives you to do it? Clients or it is just to fulfill your curiosity?" My question was clearly answered. Turned out they did their research independently. They even build up their own model base on real life evidence and work on it. It sounded so interesting and cool!
I'm truly amazed by what they are doing.

I can't help but to observe everyone in the room. Some people were well-prepared as they were talking business and they want know these professionals' view on certain issue, some attended to know more about J.P Morgan, some were just there to see if there's any recruitment and some took it seriously like an interview or opportunity to get into this successful firm. Some dare to raise up issues and some just stood aside and listen to the conversation.

This session turned out to be very informative, fresh and exciting.
I'm very happy and satisfied with everything that I've received.

Instead of giving a talk and feed us all the information they want us to know, they provided a platform to interact with us so that we get what we want to know.

I'm motivated and inspired. Hope one day I can be one of them and able to contribute on these meaningful research.

"We are doing first class business in a first class way." 
No doubt they are.


Here's a song that started my day.

Why I take JOUR1111?

Back in Malaysia, I had a great experience and memories with Society of Student Reporter, managed by one of the most popular local Chinese newspaper and our job is to record and report anything activities that happened around the school. So every Wednesday there'll be a full page in the paper with all the articles and photos that is written by us. 

Since then I started a personal blog and I've been blogging habitually about all interesting stuff that happened on me. Although the frequency of updating the blog is decreased when Twitter and Facebook became popular few years back, I still have the passion on writing and recording anything about me that is worth to be remembered.

As a third year finance major student, I took courses about finance or business and learnt how this field works. I love everything that I've been taught because no doubt it is very interesting.
But there's one thing kept bothering me for the past two years is I cannot see myself working in this busy and hectic job field. So I thought, maybe I can work as a journalist that writes things that I've been learning and make use of it. I know that writing stuff like that is a whole different story from blogging my daily life.

That's why I enrolled into this course to get a chance to write and to learn more about being a journalist.r

I still find it interesting after 2 lectures :)

Here's a pic that I took at Hervey Bay :)