Think before you drink!

In my world politics class last semester we watched an extremely interesting documentary called Black Gold which talks about fair trade coffee. You can take a look at the trailer but if you are an avid coffee drinker (like myself) you should definately just go see it...especially if you don't already know why you should care about fair trade coffee :)

Forbes.com on MySpace

This article from Forbes.com is just one of the sources I am using for my research on MySpace and Advertising but I think it is an interesting one to read because it looks at whether or not MySpace is going to become a major player in the music industry. If this is so I think MySpace could become another one of the gatekeepers of the music industry, further stifling the creative diversity of music.

Ashley

The Recording Industry
Does MySpace Music Deal Matter?
Louis Hau, 04.03.08, 2:40 PM ET

News Corp.'s MySpace finally unveiled on Thursday a long-rumored new digital music initiative under which the online social-networking giant's music community will be spun off into a separate joint-venture company co-owned with Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony-BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

Under the joint venture, the expanded music service will feature free advertising-supported streams of songs and videos from Universal, Sony-BMG and Warner recording artists, as well as an online store where visitors will be able to purchase restriction-free song downloads, ringtones and other merchandise.

Conspicuously absent from Thursday's announcement was EMI Group. During a conference call to discuss the joint venture, MySpace co-founder and Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe said that "we'd like to do business with everyone. ... We're certainly talking to everyone out there."

In an evident sign that Universal has reached a settlement with MySpace over the label's previous claims of copyright infringement, Universal Chairman and Chief Executive Doug Morris said in a statement Thursday that "our partnership with MySpace fits perfectly within our overall digital strategy of driving innovation." 

DeWolfe declined to discuss the deal's financial terms. "This was a collaborative effort to build on a model that was extremely user-friendly and was based on what our users had asked us to build," he said.

With the deal, MySpace Music will evolve from what had been primarily a promotional vehicle for artists and labels to a commercial vehicle as well, he said.

Will they be able to pull it off? Since its music community was launched four years ago, MySpace has grown into a popular, even vital, means for newly emerging artists to expose their music to new fans. And for MySpace users, the site has become a key means of discovering new music and staying in touch with what their favorite artists are up to.

But converting the public's appetite for new music discovery into lots of cold hard cash has proved to be a challenge for the industry. New ad-supported businesses are sprouting up, such as imeem.com and CBS's Last.fm, but the jury is still out as to whether those are sustainable businesses.

Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes Store has been successful in selling song downloads, but its dominance of the paid download market has given the company uncomfortably heavy leverage over the recording industry in terms of pricing and promotions. Moreover, Apple's motivations are colored by the fact that its ultimate goal is to maximize sales of iPods, not iTunes merchandise.

Indeed, the MySpace joint venture is the most explicit move so far by the recording industry to counter iTunes. The first such effort was the agreement by all four major labels to make restriction-free music downloads available at Internet retail giant Amazon.com, which launched a music download service earlier this year. 

According to an Apple memo leaked Thursday to tech blog Ars Technica, Amazon tied in January with Target as the fourth-largest retailer of music in the U.S., online or off. It was an impressive finish. But who was at the top of the list, with a 19% market share? Apple.

I'm Really Proud of this One: My Research Proposal!

Ashley Johnson

Final Research Project First Draft

April 10, 2008

COMM 3320

Ishida

 

Advertising and MySpace:

 Advertising strategies on MySpace and the effects on user youth.

 

Social network utilities play an enormous role in social development and have become an essential part of communication for youth today. MySpace in particular has become a hub for advertising that is streamlined and directly target towards the youth majority of MySpace users. The study aims to look at the advertising strategies used within the MySpace website and to predict possible effects that these strategies may have on users ages thirteen to twenty-one.

 

The rationale behind this research stems from the obviously large reach that MySpace.com has developed and the attention this has received from advertisers. Advertisers have discovered that MySpace holds a specific audience, one of a common target audience age, in a way that allows for “HyperTargeting” (Shields) and connections with popular television. Because of the extent to which MySpace offers room for advertising and the scale of audience to which these advertisements reach, it is no wonder that a question as to the effects that this may have on the younger, target audience aged, users has arose.

 

The scope of this research on advertising and social utilities has been narrowed to specifically MySpace.com, which seems to have a larger arena and invitation for advertisements. This study will be specific towards the advertising strategies that seem to aim at MySpace user youth, the target audience of thirteen to twenty-one.

 

Some background information on this subject stems from articles like Advertising to Get More Social: New ad platforms unveiled by Facebook and MySpace draw buyer rave; will users sign on? by Mike Shields in Media Week, MySpace Gives Advertisers HyperTargeting Capability by Mike Shields in Media Week, and TMZ Finds MySpace by Paige Albiniak in Broadcasting & Cable.

In Advertising to Get More Social, Mike Shields discusses the impact of new advertising initiatives amongst these social networks and the extent to which advertising on these sites could grow. Shields explains that although these buyers “were divided on the sheer magnitude of the new advertising initiative announced last week” by Facebook and Myspace, “…most agreed that these new products will propel social networking closer to reaching its most untapped targeting and viral potential” (Shields, Advertising to Get More Social). Shields also uses this article to discuss how users will adapt to these advertisements, some of which have started to allow for advertisers to create brand interaction that now reaches a much larger audience. Shields also touches on MySpace’s ad initiative known as HyperTargeting.

My next article informs the previous one. MySpace Gives Advertisers HyperTargeting Capability, again by Mike Shields, introduces the move that MySpace has made to allow “advertisers a way of targeting users based on all that personal information they supply about themselves”(Shields, MySpace Gives Advertisers HyperTargeting Capability).  A company that had been recently acquired by MySpace developed the technology that this ad platform employs to use user information to target certain audiences. This information in particular is a great example of how new media uses synergy to further expand the advertising reach.

Another article I found that inspired this research was TMZ Finds MySpace by Paige Albiniak, which explains how the tabloid television show, TMZ, has now made its own special spot on MySpace.com. “The channel is entirely advertising-supported, and both Warner Bros. and News Corp.-owned MySpace will share in the revenue”(Albiniak, TMZ Finds MySpace). Not only does this deal pertain to my research because of it huge advertisement backing but because it has been stated that TMZ itself is “[t]argeted precisely at MySpace’s youth demographic,” “…TMZ offers up clips of celebrities behaving badly, exiting plastic surgery clinics with ice packs on their faces, getting stopped by the cops, and punching paparazzi—just the sort of thing people love to forward to each other, chat about and maybe even mash up on their own”(Albiniak, TMZ Finds MySpace).

 

It is from these articles (mainly) and more that my research questions and research hypothesis emerged. Some questions I want to look at include:

RQ1: What is the extent to which the advertising on MySpace reaches?

RQ2: What are some advertising strategies used on MySpace?

RQ3: Is there evidence that these advertising strategies target youth?

RQ4: What possible effects could advertising strategies targeted at MySpace user      youth have?

 

As I have stated earlier, this study aims to look at the advertising strategies used within the MySpace website and to predict possible effects that these strategies may have on users ages thirteen to twenty-one. My research hypothesis is:

H1: Advertising on MySpace uses advertising strategies that target MySpace user youth.

H2: The advertising strategies aimed at user youth on MySpace.com will affect future consumer habits and opinions.

The method of this research will be that of a content analysis, the subject of which will be MySpace.com. The research will include an in-depth analysis of the website itself and will include background information about the advertising strategies used found in scholarly articles.  The research will also include brief interviews with some users of MySpace who are within the ages of thirteen to twenty-one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Albiniak, Paige. "TMZ Finds MySpace." Broadcasting & Cable (2008). EBSCO. 10 Apr. 2008

 

Shields, Mike. "Advertising to Get More Social." MediaWeek 17 (2007): 4-5. EBSCO. 10 Apr. 2008

 

Shields, Mike. "MySpace Gives Advertisers HyperTargeting Capability." MediaWeek 17 (2007): 4. EBSCO. 10 Apr. 2008.

My Second Critique of a Scholarly Article

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First Scholarly Article Critique

Ashley Johnson

Scholarly Article No. 1 Critique

COMM 3320

Ishida

March 2, 2008

 

Critique of “Mapping the blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena”

 

1)    Research topic and researcher(s): Mapping the blogosphere: Professional and citizen-based media in the global news arena. By: Reese, Stephen D.; Rutigliano, Lou; Kideuk Hyun; Jaekwan Jeong. Journalism, Jun2007, Vol. 8 Issue 3. Retrieved from Communication and Mass Media Complete, on March 2, 2008.

2)    Rational of the study: To analyze the relationship between citizen-based and traditional journalistic parts of the emerging weblog zone, specifically analyzing six major news and political blogs and mapping the sites they link to and also looking at the way in which they refer to these links. The four research questions guiding this study are:

1.     “To what extent do blogs link to the professional news media, and how are those references characterized?”

2.     “How is political affiliation of blogs related to their linking to professional news media”

3.     “How is political affiliation of blogs related to the affiliation of their linking choices?”

4.     “How is political affiliation of blogs related to their linking to international sites and authors?”

3)    Literature review:

·      The Internet has expanded the amount of journalism available to the public.

·      The Internet makes it possible for anyone to participate.

·      Therefore “the online environment ‘deterritorializes’ news, such that the user, creator, and news subject need no longer share the same national frame of reference.”

·      Because of this ‘deterritorialization’, the Internet breaks apart the previous relationship of the press system and the national community- this “…has a natural relationship with democracy, leading many to attach great hopes to the Internet’s potential for advancing more engaged and active citizenship around the world.”

·      ‘Blogosphere’ comes from the ‘public sphere’ idea of Habermas, which is a “…way to think about the social ‘geography’ of public communication” and the place “…where public opinion emerges.”

·      Journalism might support the conversation of the public.

·      Research is looking at how news practices and professional identity are changing due to new technology.

·      Looks at the move from closed traditional journalism to the new online open journalism that encourages dialogue from readers.

·      “…globalization and technology have produced a broader and more fluid journalistic conversations, new global public sphere with shifting boundaries.

The authors’ research questions are based on three boundaries:

1.     Professional

2.     Political

3.     Geographical

·      Professional media is defined as having a claim to ‘authority’ and the command of economic resources available to media organizations.

·      This professional media is looked at in contrast to the informal media of which the blogosphere belongs.

·      Studies of political blogs showed liberal blogs linking mainly to other liberals and conservatives to other conservatives.

·      The interest in geographical boundaries is in “…the potential for the online world to transcend national boundaries.

4)    Research method: A study of the six most popular news and political weblogs for one week and the sites that these weblogs linked to in their postings.

5)    Subject of the study: Six of the top rated new-related weblogs, three liberal and three conservative. The three liberal being: Talking Points Memo, Atrios, and Daily Kos. The three conservative being: Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Little Green Footballs.

6)    Research findings:

·      Although the distinction between traditional and new informal media remains, the authors found that the blogosphere “…relied heavily on professional news sites and stories by journalists associated with professional media organizations.”

·      The authors found that the bloggers use the information in news accounts to “…form their own arguments, reinforce views, and challenge opponents” which they go on to say that we must look at them “…ironically as in some ways preserving and reinforcing professional norms of journalism as they disseminate content generated by traditional reporting practices.”

·      The authors argue that these results show how this blogosphere “…promotes the circulation of public dialog not only by linking together other bloggers but also in anchoring their discussions to the stream of information, opinion, and analysis produced by the traditional, professional news media and by professional journalist.” Basically leading their readers to broaden their horizons and to read outside of their normal venues.

·      The combination of traditional, professional and citizen dialogue found in the blogosphere is what expands the ‘public sphere’ past its original limits.

·      The authors plan to “… evaluate this new zone not blog-by-blog, or whether it replaces a previously ‘professional’ zone, by in how it is incorporated into the larger public sphere and works to interconnect voices, both citizen and professional, so they may confront and engage each other.”

7)    My position on this scholarly essay:

I thought that overall the study was a little vague. I think the experiment left open too many independent variables surrounding these weblogs open, and I do not feel that they clearly or completely answered their research questions.

Despite the lack of clarity and room for error, I think that the findings that the authors of this experiment did find were very interesting. I think the fact that they found out that many blogs use mainly professional new stories to form and adapt their opinions is somewhat of an eye opener. I think this shows that the “old media” will mostly likely never become obsolete to the “new media” of the blogosphere, which I think is somewhat contradictory to what most people are starting to believe.

 

I really liked the idea behind this article and I think it was extremely necessary research for those of us in communication because the Internet is such a new and amazing front for communication among people and has opened public communication, the news in particular, up to those who previously did not have a voice.

 

Although this article was a little hard to follow I think it was enlightening reading in respect to the probable upcoming communications studies that will be done about “new media.”