Group 2 – News Presentation, "From Egypt to BBC!"

It's a Friday morning, and our presentation on News Media started punctually at 9.35am, without any major delay. We made warm welcome to the students by showing a lively video we prepared earlier, a work mainly contributed by the rapper genius of our group, Teppo and Markku. It received good responses and was probably a success in waking the class up as we were asked to show it again after the lecture. Cai told us that the video made him think he was actually going to be in for a 90 minute farce.

The First Part and Group Task 

Our approach to the topic of News Media was very different to the introduction video, which would be discovered in Teppo's detailed presentation on history before the birth of Newspapers. Teppo covered a lot of the early ways of conveying messages and threw questions at the audience to keep them focused. Prezi.com kept the show going in the silver screen with slides consisting mostly of picture material. After Teppo's strong input, a group task was conducted before the coffee break. Joanne and Yulia were the driving force behind this group task, which went down as follows:

• Students were divided in groups of four; 
• Each group were given six random words out of which they were asked to make a news story, based on their creativity with no limits; 
• The participants had fifteen minutes time to prepare a news presentation, in whatever medium/media they had decided to be the best suitable form of news presentation.

One of the group, making their best efforts to make excellent stories from the random keywords.

Bobo, Carol and Sindy discussing their ideas.

 Reporter (Liz) interviewing two angry truck drivers in the middle of a demonstration.

 Krista in the studio watching the 'live footage' from the scene of the demonstration

 iPad or Ears? A group demonstrates their yellow press approach on the task.

A creative news reporting from this group with keywords of: morning, shampoo, enemy, product, reward, scaffolding.

The group task was completed in joyful atmosphere. The students figured out some rather interesting ways of conveying their news and connected the words into meaningful publications. The overall atmosphere was a genuine interest of the students into understanding that news can mean so many different things. We were very happy with the active participation from the class.

TV and Radio as News Media, with Joanne

After a short fifteen minute break, we continued with Joanne's part of the presentation. We had only thirty minutes left! However Joanne managed to give her flat-out best performance using minimal time compared to our rehearsal earlier. She took the audience through two major players in the news media, radio and television.

Internet and Conclusion

Afterwards, we welcomed Yulia to talk about World Wide Web and its influence on News Media.  We think it was rather this way than News Media having an influence on the WWW. Huge topics were again blasted through with great speed because of time and finally we got to the "blogosphere". Markku rushed through good and bad qualities in both traditional News Media and civilian blogs, trying to throw ethics and law stuff into the pudding as well. If we only had more time, so that we could have gone more thoroughly into the topic. However, we got into lovely discussion with the 'professors' on the floor and Cai as well, about blogs influences to News Media and in general. Cai went deeper into the subject and we even got to show a video in the end even though we were short of time.

Feedback

We knew we were going to get a sincere feedback and were looking forward to it even before our show had started. The good points that the feedback team pointed out were encouraging and the critical feedback was very constructive. Cai pointed out that we missed one thing rather totally and that was censorship, a very important topic when speaking about news. Also in our opinion ethical, legal and universal matters in News Media would have needed more emphasizing. Despite of this we think we had built up a great lecture for the class whom participated very well. Looking forward to the next presentation!

News team