SM 431
Sport media diary assignment
PURPOSE: We want you to better understand how much or little sports media you consume and how that compares to your peers. For one week, beginning tomorrow morning, Thursday 12:01 a.m. 1/8/08 through Wednesday 11:59 p.m. 1/14/08, we want you to keep a record of EVERYTHING you consume from sports media. We will analyze the pattern of sports media use. By knowing WHAT you use in sports media you will be in a better position to think of the challenges faced by producers when they create new programming. Note: DO NOT count participating in sport or watching sports live; count only sports experienced through some form of media (including Internet, X-Box, cell phone, print and electronic media, etc.)!
PROCESS: Use a 7-column chart like the one below (MS Word or Excel is best). Simply type in, line by line, a record of each time you consume sports from the media. Use only one line for each experience. As much as possible, try to keep up to date, entering data each time you can, rather than trying to fill in multiple entries or rely too much on memory. Use as many lines as you have experiences to report. Sample entries would be as follows:
DAY / TIME / MINUTES / SOURCE. / NAME / TYPE / WHERE/WHY?Thurs / 6:20pm / 5 mins / WDIV / Sports report / TV / friend's house
Thurs / 7:00pm / 120mins / WJR / Michigan basketball / Radio / with friends - restaurant
Thur / 11:00pm / 20 mins / ESPN / ESPNSportsCenter / TV / at home
Thur / 11:30pm / 10 mins / Ann Arbor News / Sports section / Newspaper / Friend called and said story about Ron English was in newspaper
Thur / 11:50pm / 15 mins / NFL.com / Statistics / Internet / Looked up stats for 2007-8 NFL leaders
WHAT COUNTS AND SHOULD BE ENTERED? Anything you see or hear from any medium during any time that week should be entered. Include both those things you planned to do and those things you caught by chance (for example: SportsCenter playing in a bar). All sports content should be included. Sports content includes: broadcast or re-broadcast of games; highlights; scores; schedules; interviews with sports personalities; movies about sports; magazines dedicated to sports; sports talk shows; QVC collectible shows; etc. If you have any doubt, include it. DON'T DO ANYTHING SPECIAL. Try as best you can to let this be a typical week. Don't feel you need to do more for the sake of this assignment. You will not be graded on the number of entries, but for doing it on time and for your comments in the "Why?" section.
DAY: Just use the first three letters of the day you consumed the media you are reporting.
TIME: Type in the time you started watching, reading, listening or whatever. Be surety include AM or PM
MINUTES: How many total minutes did you spend on this activity? Enter that here. For example, if you are driving in your car and a five minute sports report comes on the radio and it is a rock station, that is five minutes. If you are watching a game on TV it is the total time from when you start to when you leave the last time from watching that game. If you getup to answer the phone, get food, or whatever, include that time as well. So if the game was 2 hours and 33 minutes enter 153. On the internet, only include time spent actually on sports.
SOURCE: This gets a little more difficult. Enter the name of the station, magazine, or the source that distributed the content. For the Internet, stick with the homepage sources. If you aren't certain, guess. Obvious examples are: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, ABC, Ann Arbor News, Yahoo!, and WJR.
NAME: This is even tougher. You don't need to be exact -"The sports report" "The Michigan basketball game" - we are more after the description of the program than the exact name. We want to know what it was about. WHY? This is your part. What are you getting out of the experience? Was there a specific reason you did this, or are you just killing time, or did you just walk in on the program? Be as specific as you can. It will help you do the last part of this assignment. Here is an example of how it should look:
TYPE: The most likely options here are: TV, RADIO, INTERNET, NEWSPAPER, MAGAZINE, MOVIE THEATER, VIDEO, VISUAL RECORDING, SOUNDRECORDING.