Journalism Principles and Practices
Midterm Review, Fall 2014
The midterm will be held in class on Oct. 21.
It will consist of several short answers and two essays. You’ll write the answers in a blue book.
Several of the short answers will be drawn from the current-events reading. There may also be an
opportunity to work assigned current events into one or both of the essays. Be sure to take notes on the
current-events readings, or copy them to your files, because there is no guarantee that those links will stay
active. Note, too, that if a question has been asked and answered during class it makes it more likely that
the question will reappear on the midterm.
One of the essays will definitely cover one of the films. You may also want to use what you learned from
the films in analyzing current events – specifically, “Too Big to Fail.”
While I obviously can’t be too specific about the contents of the midterm, here are some other general areas
to review:

The role of pseudo-events in news; remember Boorstin’s four-part definition.

Cycles of media history and in particular the eras of newspaper history. (All this is laid out in the
assigned reading as well as the PowerPoints on the website. It will be discussed in lecture Oct. 2.)

Economics of media industries and how specialization relates to profit. (Pay particular attention to
EPS and CPM. We will get to CPM…it hasn’t been covered yet)

The philosophy and implementation of broadcast regulation. (Coming in lecture, but summarized
on pages 208-211 in the main text; these pages have not been assigned yet but are useful for
review.)

First Amendment and free-speech protections (from lecture and reading).

The way the “medium becomes the message” – a good example being the telegraph, as discussed
in Chapter 1 and in class.

Be prepared to answer a question about logical fallacies from How to Think About Information.

A question related to “All the President’s Men.”
I may update this sheet, but the broad parameters will remain the same.