My first assigned blog post was about monitoring the website of USA Today and now, this second blog is about the alternative media and its way of covering the news. During the past three days, I looked at the reported stories of the Newsweek magazine along with articles from the New Internationalist magazine. The Newsweek magazine represents a corporate news source, meaning that it strives for a gain in profits and sells elite viewers to advertisers as foremost origin of revenue. Its jobs are to educate the public and to promote a certain perspective or attitude. The alternative news media, however, upholds a contrary objective than the corporate news business. It is a non-profit type of media and it considers itself a branch of a project that launches new ways of swaying the public opinion. Unlike the mainstream media, it does not hunt for elite groups of people but rather seeks the broad audience.
Based upon the name “New Internationalist”, we can already expect to find mostly issues from abroad while Newsweek handles issues within the United States. Yet the greatest distinction that I noticed between the two news suppliers is that the alternative media source of my choice does not provide the latest stories daily. Newsweek, on the other hand, keeps presenting up-to-minute information every single day. Newsweek entails various topics such as health, technology, and entertainment. It also includes international stories that the other media source covers. The fact that it possesses basically all the categories of subjects makes it more fulfilling than New Internationalist. The presidential election is definitely the hot topic at this point in time as the final voting day approaches. Therefore, Newsweek’s section of the “latest headlines” is mostly occupied by articles that focus on McCain and Obama. New Internationalist contains very limited amount of news, which leaves viewers to be clueless on some other subjects. It tells a lot more about the health conditions that are going on globally as world poverty is its main focus. Although the majority of its reports are serious and depressing news, it also takes time to embrace a few amusing scoops. An example of such comical story is an article called “THINGS TO DO BEFORE I RETIRE”, which was derived from the diary of our current president, George W. Bush.
While there are many differences, there’s also an essential similarity between the two sources. Both consist of interviews with regular people seen on the street. The quotes they use in their reports are directly taken from what their interviewees have stated. This makes their articles more precise and valuable, indeed. The two sources aim to concentrate on the issues that the public would want to know more about and would be interested in understanding more deeply. The fact that they involve ordinary people in their interviews gives the rest of us viewers the ability to relate to those people, which is definitely important.
