Media, Media, Media, Oh my!

My media landscape is spread out across magazines, books, newspapers, television, and the radio. While I don't interact with all of these sources on a daily basis, I do interact with many of them every day. I try to read the news each morning and usually frequent Boston.com, the Boston Globe's website, where I can unearth a mix of local and national news as well as special-interests stories, which are often really interesting. While I use the web often, I am not very adventurous with the sites I visit. On any given day I look at PAnet, Hotmail.com, facebook.com, wordreference.com (an english to spanish translation site), weather.com, and often dictionary.com. These sites tend to hold strong to their content in that they rarely venture from providing what they've promised, such as spanish words or the weather. Many of them though have advertisements that are constantly changing above a given article or weather report. Facebook seems to be capable of tracking a users interests as I've often seen advertisements targeting bands I am interested or states I have visited. The ads on facebook switch every time a person looks at a different page, so I might see up to twenty ads depending on the duration of my time on facebook.

I am also interested in music, so I am on the itunes music store daily, as well as paste.com and rollingstone.com, the websites of two music based magazines. Both of these sites advertise new artists or magazine issues themselves, and often have advertisements not pertaining to the music. This morning rollingstone. com had a Cole Haan shoe advertisement above the article I was reading. I often see advertisements for special deals or sales on rollingstone.com, usually in a really bright print that distracts the reader from the article.

My final regular interaction with a specific type of media are magazines. While I don't receive magazines monthly, my family members and roommate do. My father passes down his music magazines to me, my mother the gossip-types such as People and Us Weekly, and my roommate the fashion-based ones such as Nylon, Vogue, and Instyle. I find myself reading a magazine in each of these categories at least once in a two-week span, and none of them stick to just fashion or music or gossip. Their content ranges from politics to movies to the best restaurants in Boston, and beyond.

As far as radio and television go, I interact with these usually only over break in exceedingly large amounts. I often find myself watching television for the first three days of break almost constantly as I recover from exams. Coupled with sleeping, the channel cwtv, which runs teen-oriented shows such as Melrose Place and Vampire Diaries, comprises my vacation existence. I also watch music videos on MTV occasionally. Both of these channels tend to display the latest in teenage interest, such as vampires or a particular artist. The shows on the CW are constantly changing and each show employs twenty-somethings playing fifteen to eighteen year olds in high school. Once the comatose stage of break ends I like to catch up on music and I listen to the radio, usually gravitating towards local stations such as Jammin 94.5, The River or Mix 104.1. Jammin and Mix play the latest hit pop music and tend to have ads reaching out to the young-American population (under 30), it seems, whereas the river often plays more indie music, including music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and hosts advertisements that don't seem to target a particular age group or demographic, but most likely do. Something I am looking forward to in this class is exploring the demographics media sources target and how they do it.