What did you expect?

When I first began taking this class I had no idea what to expect we were to do. I had never taken the class before nor had I heard from the students that previously took the class. They never talked about what they did or what I should expect. I thought editing would be like any other creative workshop class, where we do some readings and discuss, plus decide on submissions. Well it really wasn't that simple.

So I open up this question. What did you guys expect this class would be like? 

Your ideal magazine

For the final paper we had due for this class (undergraduates) we had a question that said: What would your ideal magazine be like? What medium would you use? Who would be published in it? what would it look like? What are some models? (go nuts here—money and skills no object). Although I did not answer this section of the paper because I didn't know what to say since I somehow wanted a combination of every magazine out there (since they are all amazing) and had no clue as to who to publish in it, I thought of sharing it here and seeing how you guys would answer this questions.

So, how would your ideal magazine look like?

Fan of Narrative

I must say I am a big fan of Narrative Magazine. Not only because the have these weekly contest and the stories/poems that end up being publish are fun to read but also because workwith different categories: Story of the Week, Poem of the Week, iStory, Six-Word Stories, iPoem, Cartoons and Graphic Stories, Photography, Readers’ Narratives. Anything published in this magazine remains online in their archives permanently, creating a living library of excellent writing.

DIN Magazine

Our issue of DIN Magazine looks awesome and contains great pieces that really reflect the talent that we have around us. 

Although I cannot speak for everyone, I think that my group (poetry) did a spectacular job getting the content ready to be posted. The other groups did excellent jobs as well, evident from the excellent finished product that we have.

I would like to give thanks to everyone for a job well done, especially Jen and Lily for guiding us!

I hope that next year's DIN is just a great if not better than this years!

Free...that's the right price.

I found this website where you can access 2,500 different free online magazines. The link is http://www.magatopia.com/. As a college student living on a tight budget, I can totally appreciate a price tag that says free. Magatopia provides access to bushels and bushels of free magazines online. I thought I'd share.

KDP: An Awesome Tool for Writers

If you're a writer, you have probably at least once in your life thought about what it would be like to get your writing out there and share what you have to express.

Self-publishing is one avenue to spread the word. Amazon offers great services for self-publishers, like Kindle Direct Publishing.

With Amazon's KDP, you can:

• Self-Publish on the Amazon Kindle Store
• It's free and easy.
• Gain 70% royalties from purchases of your content.
• Can be purchased on apps for Android, iPad, iPod, iPhone, and many tohers.

I can't wait until I can try it out for myself!

Sleepless in Seattle: The Horror Movie

I wish they made this movie! I would so pay to see it.

Anyways, these mash-ups were awesome. It shows the power of misrepresentation. The creator of this mash-up took one persons purpose and changed it to meet another purpose. I am reminded of one of my favorite websites, Cracked, that takes what we've become accustomed to seeing and turning it upside down.

Although this experience has been enlightening and educational, there is one thing that I wish we had focused more on as a class.

I wish that more time was spent on the web design portion of the project. It was such a big part of what DIN magazine was and I felt that I would have liked to learn more about that side of the project.

That is the only suggestion that I would share for future DINs.

Skin Project: A Mortal Work of Art

One of the most interesting things that I saw in this class was the Skin Project.

The project creators define the project as a "2095 word story published exclusively in tattoos". When I first heard about the project, I was astounded. I never thought anyone would do something like this. I'm not sure that I would but I think that it is a great idea.

What word would you get?

Suggestions for next year's Din class

• Either establish corporate identity guidelines based on the first Din or allow the design team to redesign the entire magazine (including logo) from scratch; don't have murky areas in between.
  
  
• Require design team to have cohesive branding strategy developed before the PR campaign.
  
  
• Go dynamic instead of static. It means hours of extra work, but the result is worth it (even though Jen probably disagrees with me!)
  
  
• Recognize that in a team without a designated leader, each person needs to take on an additional responsibility in communicating with the group. Email can be as effective as the Wiki for working out details that the rest of the class doesn't need to be bothered with. I didn't have any problems with the people on my team, but I can see the potential for catastrophe.
  
  
• Don't make the Wiki public. If it is public, don't display names of people not in the class.
  
  
• Take the funds that weren't needed to buy a GoDaddy site and offer a small payment for submissions, or at least a contest. Wouldn't that be exciting?

Avid Ebookers vs. Print Purists

(Article:  http://mashable.com/2011/10/20/reading-ebook-versus-print/)

Ever wonder which method of reading is better for you — electronic screen or printed text?

The answer: There is no difference.

“There are no disadvantages to reading from electronic reading devices compared with reading printed texts,” according to a study by Research Unit Media Convergence of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in cooperation with MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, operator of the ebook platform Libreka!.

The study was conducted after readers in Germany became skeptical about reading from electronic devices like ereaders and tablet PCs compared to traditional printed books.

Participants in the study read a variety of texts with different levels of understanding on an Amazon Kindle 3, Apple iPad and in print. Their reading behaviors and brain activity were examined using an EEG machine and eye tracking tools.

The study proved that reading from an electronic device instead of print has no negative effects, contradicting the misconception from German readers.

“There is no (reading) culture clash – whether it is analog or digital, reading remains the most important cultural technology,” said Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel, chair of the Gutenberg-Institute of Book Studies and spokesperson for the Media Convergence Research Unit at JGU.

Although there are no differences in reading performance on a screen or a printed book, one group of participants displayed faster reading times when using the iPad.

Even in today’s digital age, most of the participants in the study stated that reading printed text is still more comfortable than reading from a screen. But ebook use is certainly on the rise, especially now that libraries have begun checking out ebooks. One recent report found that ebook checkouts at libraries rose 200% in 2010.

I liked this article because it finally put an end to the disagreements between print and ebooks. I have friends that have refused to even consider reading books in electronic format because it was bad for your health, expensive, uncesseary and so forth. I personally read books in both formats and haven't experienced any negative reactions from either. :) 

What do you think?

Is multimedia replacing the print word?

Check out this video courtesy of our good friends at Spark Notes:

You've now got complete run down on Huxley's "Brave New World".  Why would you even want to read the book? Of course, I have read the book and would read it again but most people are not like that. It's sort of like some people say "I'd rather watch the movie." Thoughts?

The Sky is Not Falling, Henny Penny.

I do not believe fiction is dead. Those yellow post-it notes sticking out of my Writer's Market all represent pages that have at least one magazine or journal buying short stories. Of course some have more prestige than others, but I'm not going to sit around and worry that I will have hundreds of high quality stories and no VQResque literary journals left to submit them too. It is more realistic to worry about getting so caught up in the panic about fiction's demise that I don't have time to write or send submissions anywhere. Therefore, I've decided to learn a lesson from Henny Penny and not worry about the sky falling.

Cracked.com - America's Only Humor Site

Although not typically thought of as a online magazine, I think that Cracked is the direction that I would take a digital magazine. The dynamics are simply superb. There are articles, columnists, forums, multimedia, and much more. This is the kind of interactive magazine that I think will catch the attention of audiences who have grown up in the digital age.

I particularly like the lists that they published. For example, my one of my favorites is "6 Pet Products that Prove Rich People Have Gone Insane". This list includes renting pet tuxes for weddings, hiring a pet party planner, mansions for the dog, and custom portraits.

If every online magazine had this kind of dynamic, I would never be able to tear myself away!

What's in a font?

Choosing a font for an online magazine can be difficult. You want to choose a font that will be reader-friendly but also goes along with the theme of your magazine. 

In the past, I have used a website called TypeTester. This website allows you to test and compare three different fonts at a time so that you can decide which font is the best. I also allows you to choose different font colors and page backgrounds. This is an awesome tool because it takes out the element guessing that may be involved with web creation.

I would encourage everyone to check it out!

Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/

Okay, so I promise I'm not a statistics nerd or anything, but I do occasionally love to use Google Trends because it can graphically show how ridiculous and ADD we can be in our culture. So, so many interesting things, and they all tell a story. Think Kanye West was a jerk to Taylor Swift back in 2009? Well stats show she was trending over three times as much right after the incident occurred. Free publicity, anyone? I mean, has anyone given a damn about Taylor Swift since then? And of course, Google Trends can be used to chart the progress of all these crazy memes that are emerging as part of internet culture.

More time on...?

There wzs something in the paper prompt that didn't end up fitting into the flow of my paper so I thought I'd discuss it here, which is things I wish we'd spent more time on.  Now, some of this is my own silly fault, as you will see.

I just think that we as a class could have spent more time discussing web design, what sites to use, navigation ideas, maybe running us through a little basic HTML.  I know, I know, if I wanted to learn more about design I should have joined the design group or taken a lower division web design course (specifically web design, not graphic design...does NMSU offer that?).  Maybe take some time to toy around with Flash (or whatever Flash alternative may emerge that is compatible with those fancy-shmancy Apple products).

I just think that an actual web page itself, regardless of content, is something that can be approached in a number of interesting ways, perhaps some more navigable than others.  I just think that after looking at sites like "Whale Hunt" with their fascinating interfaces, there is more than one way to skin this cat.

Why do magazines still have "issues"

This is something I ended up writing about briefly in my paper, and though tit was interesting enough to share here as well.  I was thinking about an example of a magazine that failed in print but successfully transitioned entirely to the web (I saw someone's post in drafts that looks like it's about the same site: Cracked.com).  Of the many things I noticed that they do now that a traditional magazine would not have done, I noticed that they update the articles and change their front page on a daily basis as new content becomes available, posting a handful of new items at a time.  Traditional magazines tended to load their issues up with a lot more content than this, because they had to pay printing and distributing costs and it's frankly more practical to do that all at once.  But these reasons don't apply to the web, and with our increasingly shortening attention spans we are less likely to read all of 100 articles published at once monthly than we are to read 4 articles published daily. 

Now, this doesn't apply to Din because it's only in operation during the course of a single semester and has different staff for every issue, but it's something for other magazines making the switch to consider.

On Groups and Leadership

Now I'm not saying that this was a problem that I had this semester; everything actually worked very well and went very smoothly.  But, just as a thought for other times teaching the class, it might be taken into consideration to have the groups (Prose, Criticism, Multimedia) select someone to put in charge in some loose sense.  Maybe some groups did this anyway, though mine didn't, and though we were fortunate enough to get the work done without any serious hangups I wonder how much more organized and efficient we could have worked with a more centralized authority.
This class is actually one of my rare experiences in which group work didn't result in (A) Someone being put in charge, (B) Someone rising up organically to take charge, or (C) Nothing getting done because everyone's running in different directions and not communicating well.

This semester was the exception, but just as something to consider if things aren't working as well in later semesters.  I realize it goes against some of the publishing models that we studied about, but I recall George Hitchcock making a compelling argument in favor of "dictatorships" in publishing.

How to create a Fictional Character in magezine

1.      The type of character you create determines how the story will arc. If the main

character/s are closely aligned with their setting, the arc will begin shallowly, and the

character will tend to blend in with their surroundings and the other characters around

them. If they're diametrically opposed, dramatic conflict will unfold from the very

beginning, and will have to work itself out from there.

 

2.      Decide if you want to create a protagonist (hero) or antagonist (villain). Maybe you

need a secondary character such as a henchman, a best friend, or a

boyfriend/girlfriend. Do subtleties in character or alleigance affect the way events

play out? You might need anti-heroes (Spike from Buffy), sympathetic villains

(Frankenstein's monster), wild cards (Jack Sparrow), treacherous friends (Iago from

Othello), or a trickster guide (Smeagol/Gollum).

Determine whether the character is male or female, and the approximate age. Age can

3.      show the reader minute details about your character. For example, an older, wise

villain could be portrayed as an aging, lonely man. A naive, enthusiastic hero could be

shown as a young teenage girl or boy. Sometimes these can be

contradictory; Don Quixote was a crotchety old man who'd spent his life in a room

reading chivalry novels, and as naive as they come; it was this naivety that drove him

out to seek adventure and make it up when it was nowhere to be found.

Top 10 Websites For Designers – May 2012

1.      Apartment One
Apartment One is an award-winning creative agency based in Brooklyn, NY, founded by Liza Lowinger and Spencer Bagley in 2005. They re-launched their website in March 2012 to showcase a wide range of brand identity and design projects for clients such as Daily Candy’s Swirl, Poppin, Artspace, Momfilter, The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation’s Soul Kitchen and Future Fortified.

2.      Toormix
Toormix is a creative studio based in Barcelona that specializes in branding, editorial, graphic design and communication projects. Their self-promotion website is a visual portfolio of the projects created for a wide range of national and international clients.

3.      Breezi Website Builder
Breezi is an intuitive website builder and website editor for designers who are just getting started in web design. The full featured website editor includes pixel level control, in place text edits, social media apps, flexible layouts, forms, SEO control and the use of your own domain.

4.      MohawkConnects.com
MohawkConnects.com is Mohawk’s new website which integrates e-commerce into all dimensions of Mohawk’s online activities. The consolidation of Mohawk’s previous sites required the creation of a new technology platform. The launch of MohawkConnects.com coincides with Mohawk’s new name, new brand, a simplification of Mohawks product line, new specification tools for customers, and the launch of a new promotional campaign, “What will you make today?” Hydrant designed the website using the Pentagram-designed brand; Avatar developed the site.

5.      Future-ish
Future-ish is a fusion website and blog that keeps tabs on the science, design, and culture shaping the future. From Stylish Scientists and our annual Citizens of the Next Century list to FAB Finds and our ‘you know you’re a science, design, and/or a culture geek when…” list, Future-ish is home sweet home for people who like a little Isaac Mizrahi with their particle physics while vacationing on Maui.

6.      My Little Underground
Designer Christopher David Ryan offers a wide selection of graphic prints on this site that are perfect for decorating your home or design office.

7.      Jonathan Burton
Jonathan Burton is a British illustrator living and working in France. His work has appeared on covers and in the pages of TIME, Nature, New Scientist, The Times, Plansponsor, The Wall Street Journal and many more magazines and newspapers. (Be sure to check out the series of covers he created for Penguin Modern Classics.)

8.      Victoria Fernandez
Based in Madrid, Victoria Fernandez creates adorable illustration and animation for clients like Nick Jr.

9.      Pat Perry
Pat Perry is an artist and illustrator who calls Grand Rapids, Michigan home. I’m pretty sure he’s trying to melt your face off with his amazing work.

10.  Liam Stevens
Liam Stevens is an image maker and designer based in London. He favors simple materials enabling him to craft his work through expressive lines or graphic shapes and is particularly fond of his Pentel 0.7mm mechanical pencil, coloured paper stash and scalpel.

 

amazing cover

What Does the Future Hold for the Digital Media Industry?

There are some experiences our kids may never have. Folding down the corner of a page in a book. Leafing through the classifieds section of a newspaper. Renting a movie from the video store … and taking it back again the next day. Rushing home to watch a TV show at its allotted time.

But let’s not get caught up in our nostalgia for these ghosts of media past. The next generation will have a richer media experience than any other.

They’ll have iPads in their earliest years, making touch interaction with text and media the norm. They’ll have ebooks — millions of them — available anywhere, anytime. They’ll live in a world of constant connectivity where media consumption becomes a truly social experience — an act of sharing and engaging. They’ll be their own publishers, editors and distributors; their own DJs. Their media consumption will be personalized, curated, customized to their specific tastes — and yet they’ll have access to a diversity of opinion much broader than before.

They’ll consume more media, from more sources, and in a greater range of formats than we imagined — news websites, live-streaming video, on-demand TV, podcasts, mobile apps, ebooks, news aggregators, video-sharing services, audiobooks, movie-streaming services, blogs, social networks, music subscriptions and a litany of formats yet to be invented.

Our generation stands between the two eras: Dismantling the old and imagining the new. What can we build together? How do we navigate this new media landscape?

Why is blogging so popular?

Sometimes I wonder why social software has become so popular. We've never seen a phenomenon like blogs before - 16 million blogs tracked by Technorati is undoubtedly an understatement, because of all the dark blogs out there that are hidden away behind firewalls or passwords. There may be millions of blogs that just don't ping Technorati - such as Korean blogs - so are 'invisible' to their indexing spiders. Who knows how many blogs there really are, but it could well be in the hundreds of millions.

Cast your mind back to the beginnings of the World Wide Web, to Netscape Navigator, to the days when a website had to be hand coded and blinking text was all the rage. Back then, the predictions were that soon everyone would have a home page. Everyone would have a presence on the web.

But that didn't happen, because even with the eventual development of WYSIWYG HTML editors, the barrier to entry was still far too high. People didn't know HTML and didn't want to know HTML. It took Blogger to bring that barrier down and make publishing on the web as easy as writing an email.

Five years on from the launch of Blogger and the spread of blogging shows no signs of slowing down. Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere posts show that the blogosphere appears to be doubling in size every five to six months.

Yet I'd argue that the technology behind blogging hasn't changed all that much in five years. We've added bells and whistles - comments, trackbacks and tags - but the basics of blogging have remained the same. We are still publishing our thoughts on whatever topic we're passionate about to the world (or just our friends), the same as we were back then.

The success of blogging has nothing really to do with software or technology, but is instead down to the fact that it allows us to interact online in the same way we do offline. With chit chat and cat pictures and discussions of the best recipe for teriyaki salmon, interspersed occasionally with a bit of cooing and billing over the latest gadget/car/mobile phone/knitting pattern. Blogging allows us to get to know people gradually by reading their blog, by leaving comments, by having a blog for them to read, so that communities form unhampered by geography. It allows our personalities to shine through, allows us to be who we are (or who we wish to be).

We have a long and lustrous history of epistolary relationships, from letters between lovers exchanging heartfelt paeans to their devotion, to professorial colleagues discussing the advances they are making in their research. For centuries, the letter has been the key to strengthening weak ties. The phone seems still alien to some of us - that disembodied voice burning our ears - and email is fraught with a lack of emotion that can accidentally engender arguments. But blogs provide what letters once did - persistence, context, presence.

With blogs, we can converse with our friends and with strangers who might one day turn into friends. We can embrace the world and transcend the limits of geography. But most importantly, with blogs we are free to be who we want to be.

 

Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama told ABC News in an interview that came after the president faced mounting pressure to clarify his position.

In an election that is all but certain to turn on the slowly recovering economy and its persistently high jobless rate, Mr. Obama’s stand nonetheless injects a volatile social issue into the campaign debate and puts him at even sharper odds with his presumptive Republican rival, Mitt Romney, who opposes same-sex marriage and favors an amendment to the United States Constitution to forbid it.

Hours before the president’s announcement, Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, restated his opposition to same-sex marriage in an interview with KDVR-TV, a Fox News affiliate in Colorado.

“When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Mr. Romney said. “My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights and the like are appropriate, but that the others are not.”

Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even professional pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor. Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television, without controversy.

Yet time after time, when the issue is put to voters in states, they have chosen to ban unions between people of the same gender or to defeat measures that would legalize same-sex unions. Just Tuesday, North Carolinians voted overwhelmingly to add a ban to their state constitution, and Republican leaders in the Colorado House blocked a vote on legislation to allow civil unions; North Carolina and Colorado are considered swing states in presidential politics.

Nationwide, according to the pollster Andrew Kohut of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, a plurality of swing voters favors same-sex marriage, 47 percent to 39 percent, and outside the South the margin widens to a majority of 53 percent in favor and 35 percent opposed; in the South, a plurality of 48 percent opposes same-sex marriage. Swing voters generally do not have strong opinions on the subject, Mr. Kohut said, though in the South 30 percent of swing voters say they are strongly opposed.

Supporters of same-sex marriage were quick to praise the president’s decision to speak out.

“President Obama’s words today will be celebrated by generations to come,” said Chad Griffin, the incoming president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. “For the millions of young gay and lesbian Americans across this nation, President Obama’s words provide genuine hope that they will be the first generation to grow up with the freedom to fully pursue the American dream. Marriage — the promise of love, companionship, and family — is basic to the pursuit of that dream.”

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, called the president’s statement “a watershed moment in American history” that would aid efforts to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York said, “No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people, and I have no doubt that this will be no exception.”

Some supporters saw the president’s announcement in more political terms.

How to Design an Effective Newspaper Ad

Instructions

1

Start with a powerful headline that will attract the reader's eye to your ad. Use relatively short phrases with action words related to your promotion. The use of humor, questions, seasonal references or popular cultural phrases can be effective as long as they are readily understood by your audience. If the ad is part of an ongoing promotion or one of several used in various media outlets, keep your headlines consistent. Make sure the headline is presented in a very readable font.

2

Write a concise presentation of your promotion, sale or marketing message. Although your newspaper audience is interested in reading articles, they won't necessarily read your ad. Make sure the message you are trying to communicate is short and straightforward. Use bullet points rather than sentences. Highlight or bold recognizable brand names and promotion offerings. Include a call to action such as "call now," "visit our web set," or "bring in this coupon."

3

Use black and white space effectively. Because newspapers are mostly words and crowded advertising space, large areas of white or black tend to attract the reader's eye. Consider using minimal teaser text on larger black or white fields for your entire ad or for your headline area. This will make your ad stand out above others on the page.

4

Choose typefaces and graphics that will reinforce your brand. Limit your fonts to three at most to give your ad a clean look. Make sure they are very readable and reflect the tone of your ad, whether classic and sophisticated or funky and trendy. Consider using elements of your logo or simple illustrations and photographs that can be repeated through multiple ad runs and media outlets to offer greater brand recognition.

5

Give your logo and contact info the best placement. For newspaper ads, that means the bottom right corner. Because people read from left to right and top to bottom, placing your logo in the lower right will ensure that it is the last thing the reader sees as he scans your ad. Be sure to include your phone number and Web address with your logo.

Effective Storytelling Techniques

When you use effective storytelling techniques you can turn a tame story into a fantastic experience. Storytelling is fun for children and adults alike, especially if you take the time to create the proper mood and setting. You can learn storytelling by watching an experienced storyteller or just practice on your own. Try some of these storytelling techniques to enhance your own stories.

·         Set the Mood: Stories are best received when they are told in a unique setting. Try telling stories around a campfire, in a dark room with flashlights, nightlights or candles or out on a blanket by the light of the moon. Children and adults alike will get into the story more if you set up the storytelling as an event. Setting the mood builds the anticipation.

·         Set up the Story: Before you launch into telling the actual story, you'll want to set up your audience to know what to expect. If you are telling a funny story, you'll want to start out with some good-natured joking about the story. If you're telling a spooky story, you'll want to joke about creepy-crawly types of things or about how you hope this story doesn't scare the kids too much. Have fun with your introduction. Look up jokes if you're not good at ad libbing. Again, the point here is to build the anticipation.

·         Make Sure Everyone Is Comfortable: To truly enjoy a story, the audience has to be comfortable. If you're outside, make sure to provide blankets or camp chairs to sit on and use citronella candles or bug spray to keep the insects away.

·         Exaggerate as You Tell the Story: The best storytellers practically act out the story as they tell it. Raise and lower your voice; use different voices for different characters. Bring along props to help you with sound effects. Make sure you've memorized the story and have practiced beforehand so you can tell the story smoothly, pausing for dramatic effect when appropriate.

·         Stay in Character: It's easy to get wrapped up in the response of the audience when telling a story, especially if you're making the audience laugh or gasp. However, you need to keep your distance and perform so you won't lose your place in the story or forget key lines. Walk the line between interacting with the audience and becoming so flattered by the enthusiasm that you lose your authority as the storyteller.

·         Have Fun: Most important, you need to bring enthusiasm to the story. Enjoy yourself and your audience will enjoy the story.

newspaper or magezine

As everyone can see， news abounds in the world we live in.Everyday we can barely go without news which keeps us in formed of what is going on outside；in other words， news enables us to keep in contact with the world. It's almost indispensable， isn't it？ As for which medium of newspaper and television is of great use， in my opinion， it depends. In order to draw a clear distinction between the two， I think it may be better to take into account the functions of mass media as a whole in the first place.

　　What are the main functions of mass media？

　　To begin with， the primary function of mass media is to inform. Via media the public receives the most up to date news in the world， national and local events. Also the media is used to warn the danger of such things as approaching storms， escaped and dangerous criminals and epidemics and so forth. Without it people may be vulnerable when facing these dangers with no warning in advance.

　　Secondly， mass media can educate the public.  Media coner-friendly. Most housewives are inclined to watch a TV program on how to cook rather than to read a dull recipe on a news paper because the former is more vivid and makes the cooking easier to learn. Students are more interested in teaching programs on TV for it feels more intimate and friendly to get a lesson from a smiling teacher than a whole page of monotonous exercises on the newspaper.

　　Here comes the third function， the entertainment.  As today's society is to some extent "diversified" as far as their interests and tastes are concerned， newspaper and TV can be favored by different people. In newspaper， the games of cross puzzles，hero scopes （telling "You are in line for an unexpected wind fall"） may go well with the idlers while thrilling movies may at tract the young.

　　In a nutshell， as the old saying goes： "Life is always gray instead of being black and white". With the overlapping information and roles of both newspaper and TV， it is wise to complement these two. Only by getting a clear picture of their strengths and weakness can we make a better use of them both.

examples of great magazine design

8 faces magazine

8 Faces is a print magazine for devotees of typography and the aim of the magazine is to bring type to the masses. Noting that current publications on the subject are often unnecessarily highbrow and carry an extremely high price tag, Elliot Jay Stocks decided to develop a magazine for the people who love type, but you don’t have to be a real type nerd to enjoy it. The main goal? to encourage learning and passion for typography at all levels.

An Amazing Semester for An Amazing Magazine :D

I would just like to say that this year's DIN Magazine looks pretty amazing, and I would even go as far as saying that it is the best yet. I might just be biased (it really is though). I had an amazing time with everyone this semester, and I genuinely enjoyed this class. I learned a lot of new things about new ideas, and even more new ways of thinking about old ideas. I have never done some of the things like I have in this class. I have never blogged before, I have never been a part of publishing before, and I have never helped put up a website before. These were all great things for me to learn about that will be extremely beneficial to me when I graduate on Saturday. I wish I would have known about more classes similar to this one in the past, and even though I was crazy busy enough with seventeen credits, I wish this class had met more than once a week. It was one of the classes I actually looked forward to. It had such a positive, and collaborative atmosphere to it. And, of course, I must thank Jen and Lily for all of their hard work on DIN and helping us succeed. I know there were some lost hours of sleep, and maybe a few tears in the end, but they held it together, kept a cool composure, and brought the whole thing together.

Whose Story is it to Tell?

In class a few weeks ago, we discussed the Grapes of Wrath Revisited project. So, is the Plight of Native Americans Chris McGreal's story to tell? Some might argue that the Grapes of Wrath Revisited is another form of colonialism: a British man coming to America and trampling over indigenous agency with his project; this would give an ironic twist to his inclusion of Petruuche Gilbert's quote,“We are prisoners living in occupied America”.

Crowdfunding Motivated by Altruism?

Crowdfunding is a fascinating device to me. It escapes being a full charity by the exchange of goods for the money that is being offered, but it seems to me to essentially be a charity. I think Chris said something along the lines of it being the digital version of extending your hand asking for spare change on the streets. The opportunities that crowdfunding opens up to inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists is astounding. Essentially, it cuts out the traditional middleman of the bank, production companies, and marketers, and puts all the power in the hands of the creators. But what motivates a person to give their money to someone they've never seen, and to something that may show very little return on investment?

I believe it has to be simply altruism. Why do people give their money to charities other than to feel like they've done something good, or made a difference? I believe the same concept has to be true here. Americans have this concept that anything can be done and anybody can become anything, but a lot of time money stands in the way of that ideal. Maybe a person will never achieve their ambitions, but at least they can say that they contributed to the success of someone else's dreams. That has to be the driving motivator behind these "donations."

But another things factors into crowdfunding, which is seeing a great idea come to fruition, which pays great dividends to the investor if the project becomes a reality. There are tons of ideas that never get off the ground because of lack of funding, so if a person sees an idea that they like, they can assure that it makes it by giving. For example, if someone told me they were going to create a Superman vs. Goku movie and they could prove to me that it wasn't going to suck if they got a certain amount of money, I would donate a lot of cash to that project because I know that if I didn't, I would never get to see something like that come to fruition because Hollywood probably isn't going to jump at such a niche movie. By donating, I can at least try to assure that this dream comes true.

The Death (read: Rebirth) of Newspapers

The slow decline of newspapers comes as now surprise in this increasingly digital age. However, it seems to me that many people are mourning the passing of this traditional form of media, but it makes little sense to me. Maybe it's because I'm a "technology native," having grown up with a computer in my household since I was in the 3rd grade, but it just seems silly that some people are sad that newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur. It's not that the news is going away, or that our freedoms are lessened, or that jobs are being significantly decreased. It has just changed it's packaging. It would be like saying "I used to like Pepsi; that was, before they changed they changed their logo." Alright, so that's a little hyperbolic, as I can understand the nostalgia of getting a paper on your front porch, the smell, the feel, the flipping of the pages, but that seems a silly thing to mourn.

I once had a professor that became livid at me because I used a digital version of a book instead of the print version. He told me, "This is why I got into this business! For books!" He then forced me to touch one of his books saying "Here! Touch it! This is a book. It has pages. You could have just asked me for a copy and I could have given it to you." Such aggression and aversion to the digital is baffling to me. Are the words any less meaningful? Can I not have the same experience by clicking and scrolling rather than flipping and leafing? Are notes in the margins less useful when they are in a digital format?

Nostalgia can be a strange beast, but I say to those who feel they are being ripped away from that which they have grown so fond of; what you love is still there, it just has different packaging.

Unfortunately we lost a great writer today. I don't know how much of an impact he has had in your lives, but he sure did have one on mine. I am talking about the great Maurice Sendak, the writer of Where The Wild Things Are. I grew up with this book. It is one of the first books I can remember reading, and I read it often. I Still think back on that book a lot, and I really enjoyed the movie they made out of it. I am so sad to see someone who had so much talent go.

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go- We’ll eat you up- we love you so!”

P.s. How do you get something to unhighlight? I tried to unhighlight the quote and somehow managed to highlight the rest of the text. Thanks