Radio

99.5 FM - Commonly called "My 99.5" because the station is in theory run by the listeners. There is no DJ that gets on and talks ever. A computer voice, after the song is played, says the name of the song. People can call in, leave a message, and say whatever they want, and it often gets put directly on the air. The music they play is predominantly recent music from current artists, mostly pop and rock, and Indy rock, as well as some older stuff of the same genre. As far as advertising goes, they advertise to the young generation with things like phone advertisements like AT&T as well as fast food places.

103.9 FM - Also called "107.9 The Mix". They play music from the "80s, 90s, and now". A DJ announces the song that will be next played as well as advertisements for the station itself and sometimes mentions promotions going on. Just like 99.5, they play pop and rock. As far as advertising goes fast food places and cell providers are popular advertisers on the station. One example is AT&T. They have a lot of commercials on the station.

KSL news radio - DJs talk about local events, local news as well as national news and weather forecasts. Typical advertising include home improvement products and services, things for kids as well as a lot of car commercials. This shows that the demographic they try to hit with advertising are families with children. They also do sporting events like football and basketball games.

104.3 - Known as "The Cowboy 104.3". A DJ announces songs and other things. If the name didn't already give it away, its a country music station. They do Weather forecasts and some news as well as play music. They also have "the fewest commercials". The advertising is directed towards the older generation families with kids. Advertisements include things like grocery store advertisements, car commercials and home improvement products and services.

107 - Known as "Movin 107". From what I could tell, the station was more geared toward females. With advertisements like the Blue boutique and cosmetology schools as well as playing "girl power" songs, their audience would predominantly be female. There really is no DJ. Pre-recorded voices announce songs and advertise the station.

As far as success is concerned, all of these stations are made possible by advertising paying for them, but the reason that advertisers are willing to put their commercials on the stations is because the stations are successful in grabbing listeners. For 99.5, they allow people in the state of Utah to basically run the station, allowing for these advertisers to see that a lot of people listen based on how many people call in, as well as knowing that a lot of the young generation listen to the genre of music that is played. For 103.9, again the genre of music matches the demographic of the young generation, which a lot of advertisers want to hit. Also,

Newspaper

Many metropolitan daily newspapers have lost circulation and some have shut down. One example of this is The Capital Times which has run for approximately 90 years. The article that reports on this was in the New York times that says the daily shutdown because of decreasing print revenue and increasing online revenue.

For community newspapers, people remain interested in recieving the daily local news. To me, the reason that these continue to do well is because in a typical city, in order to get local news, the local weeklies is practically the only place to go. For example, the Penn-Trafford Star in Pitsburgh, which has recently been launched and is finding success. The success of these weeklies comes from the local crowd that looks to these papers as one of if not the only means of truly local news.

One of our local papers, The Daily Herald, I find that there is a lot of soft news throughout the paper in comparison to hard news. The topics often covered are political news focused mainly on the Presidential and Vice-Presidential canidates. The soft news often has to do with feel good veteran stories (Veteran reunions) and feel-good sport legend stories (Lavell Edwards turns 78) I think that the newspapers still do a decent job of being "watch-dogs" but certainly not to the degree they used to. It is not uncommon to find a newspaper absolutely packed with feel-good stories and few hard news stories that would be considered the "watch-dog" stories of old.

Magazines

I went Seagull Book on University Pkwy and they directing me to magazine that is certainly not in my interests. The magazine was "Taste of Home" which is a cooking magazine. The typical reader seemed to be a midage woman probably with kids, that likes to learn about new cooking ideas as well as home decorative things. The reason I came to this conclusion is based on the content and the advertising. The advertising consisted of cook books like "Everyday Slow Cooker and more dish recipes" and "Delectable Desserts". Also, throughout the whole magazine, there were many pictures of middle age woman, including a profile of Katie Brown who is a "life style expert".

The electronic media has had a fairly big impact on the magazine industry in that people have more access to the material in the magazines, but do not buy as many or go look at as many hard copies now that they are available electronically. The best example that I find is the fact that when students look to find information on topics, they have access to magazine articles directly and now do not go look at the hard copies as often. I know that when I want to find a magazine article, I go online and search directly for the articles. The impact of this on the magazine industry is that less people are looking at advertisements which would lead advertisers to not be as prone to buy magazine advertisements.

Read any good books lately?

After polling 10 people I found the following results pertaining to books.

Avg number of books read in the last 6 months - 4.5

Types of books read - Religious books, novels, programming language books, and textbooks.

This tells me that my sample do read a lot per se, but that they do read a fair amount. All of them mentioned reading religious books as well as textbooks. This would suggest that they are religious students, which is true.


In college, I would rather use electronic text books. This makes these books accessible anywhere and is significantly less expensive. The only reason why I would want to use hard copy books is so I can highlight things, but you can print off those books and highlight the pages. I'm taking a Public Speaking class that is using an electronic text, so I just printed off the pages and it serves just as good as a hard copy at a fraction of the price.

As far as leisure reading goes, I would prefer hard copy. There is something to be said about having a hard copy book, sitting down and just enjoying a good story. Also, it gets annoying staring at a screen to read, especially considering how much time I spend doing other things on a computer. One example for me is that I like to read millionaire kind of business books and I would not enjoy kicking back and reading one on the internet as I would reading through a hard copy book.