Presentation

Here is a screenshot of the presentation I did on social actions and community media.

Here is a link to the full presentation: http://prezi.com/mpk3sy7mhrdc/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Community Media: Left Lion & Nottingham Post

Community media is any form of media that is produced and ran by a community. It is separated from commercial media, state run media and public broadcasting. 

Left Lion is a good example of this as it is controlled and only published within the community of Nottingham. It has a strong focus on the local arts and music scene. It is more of a magazine than a newspaper since it talks mostly about projects going on in Nottingham and the local creative interests. For example they conduct interviews with new and upcoming local bands like ‘Unknown Era’, this is a good way to promote the local music scene and get Nottingham’s name out there. The kind of things that Left Lion post on Facebook are related to social action within Nottingham. On the 5th November they posted a status about the Hockley Arts Club, showing that they're taking applications from people related to anything creative, this is social action as creativity is a free aspiration for everyone and visiting the Art Club is free as well as being a gathering for the communities love for art.


On the other hand, the Nottingham Post reports on more factual news rather than recreational activities. It’s a tabloid newspaper therefore the word count is usually at a minimum, whereas the Left Lion contains feature articles with background imagery, containing up to one or two pages of words. The Nottingham Post structures their articles into separate sentences as paragraphs, whilst including large imagery and brief information.  The Nottingham Post keeps its news solely within the Nottingham area just like the Left Lion, but delivers its news in a straight forward manner, rather than descriptive interviews used in Left Lion.

Left Lion’s audience is mostly tailored towards the younger members of Nottingham and those that are interested in the local creative scene. This can be shown by Jack Garofalo in his live review of DJ Yoda. “This left virtually the whole room as a dancefloor, slowly filling up as more punters made their way through the door”. You can tell by the language used in this sentence that it caters further toward the youth side of Nottingham due to the use of slang, and also alcoholic terms throughout the review.

The Nottingham Post’s audience is in theory for everyone within the region of Nottinghamshire. However I decided to study the content it provides which caters more toward the older citizens of Nottingham. For example these could be crime reports, like the fire at Rushcliffe Arena, or property, to jobs within the area. “A planning Application has been submitted to Rushcliffe Borough Council by Nottingham firm CBP Architects on behalf of Mark Fielding, of Winlatter Drive, West Bridgford.” This quote is taken from the article ‘Neighbours object to new apartment block in West Bridgford’ written by the Nottingham Post. This shows the simplistic language used to appeal to a wider audience, as well as the structure, because this is what each paragraph would look like; a single sentence.

Left Lion also contribute within social media. They have a Twitter and Facebook, bringing their readers together, to communicate with one another, and share opinions. You will notice that the only people that follow the Left Lion on these social media sites are residents of Nottingham, or used to live in Nottingham. Being a magazine on a social media website is beneficial as it keeps your readers up to date as well as increasing the amount of publicity within your local area. If somebody follows Left Lion on Twitter, that person most likely has friends that are also form Nottingham, this forms a continuous chain of local peoples following their esteemed local magazine.

Left Lion and the Nottingham Post have their similarities, such as the focus on the local area. However they are written in completely different formats, which aim towards different means. Community media also intertwines more onto the side of the Left Lion as it is a lot more community driven instead of being more commercially driven like the Nottingham Post.