Introduction to the Research Project

This blog is devoted to an assigned project for the Communication Studies 111 (section 006) class at the University of Michigan for the Winter 2012 semester.  The class meets once a week in North Quadrangle (pictured left).  North Quadrangle is the home of the Communication Studies program in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts.  I am working with three other group members on this project.

Our research question is “How has soft news developed in American non-print media in the past twenty years?” Scholars have observed a growth in the amount of soft news and a reduction in the amount of hard news in recent years. This trend could have profound implications for the already-changing landscape of journalism that is being shaped by the Internet and new media, so we wanted to learn more about the development of soft news in particular. We conduct a broad overview of the history of news in the past twenty years and note several key trends in the evolution of news during that time frame.

(Photo by AndrewHorne (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)