Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #6 - Mobile WAVE

This is Samuel Watkins... with the final post for Season Two if Sam’s Hot Takes! I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this content as much as I enjoyed making it, even if it was admittedly a bit rushed.
A lot of people consume the news on their mobile device. It’s always in our pockets and extremely accessible compared to something like a cable show or newspaper. Therefore, it’s really important that a news outlets website is mobile compatible… and there’s our problem.

Browsing the WAVE website on my phone, I notice some immediate problems. Primarily, it takes way too long to find what you need and even longer to browse if you just want to stay updated. The link to one particular story and corresponding photo takes up about half of your screen, and it’s extremely cumbersome to categorize this massive and poorly formatted list of stories because scrolling in the categories section after clicking the three lines in the upper-left often doesn’t work correctly, and causes you to hit a tag you didn’t want to. Lastly, ads also take up about half the phone screen during your scroll, perpetuating both these problems. Overall, it’s clear the website needs a mobile revamp.

Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #5 - WAVE Off Filler

This is Sam’s Hot Takes - bringing you our penultimate post of Season Two! It’s been a wonderful, albeit short journey. 
I find the dynamic of incorporating filler into local cable news quite interesting in general. Unlike a lot of my peers, I think that it definitely has its place. Often, there’s just a slow news day… and that doesn’t mean you can just end your broadcast there. So, you’ve gotta fill it up!
But WAVE’s approach to filling empty time seems to be a lot different than one might initially perceive. Instead of only including stories that aren’t relevant, they’ll often find some really heart-warming human interest story that’s local - or expand more in detail about a national story and give it some local perspective. In my opinion, it’s an extremely admirable approach, and it’s something I wouldn’t have thought out had I not done this project. Hopefully, quality local news coverage like this can help bring a new wave of reporters into the scene. But hey, that’s just my take.

Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #4 - An Applause for a WAVE

This is Sam’s Hot Takes, Season Two and Post Four... where we’re now definitely panicking, but nevertheless staying positive!

There’s a lot of things that WAVE does really well. First of all, the show generally presents news in a really enjoyable and easy to digest format. I very rarely find myself bored when I’m watching, as they stay on each topic for the perfect amount of time and strike a nice balance between local and national stories.

Everything also transitions well, and the anchors we see on screen are fun to watch and have a solid chemistry. Though I do think there are faults with our local news project (something I might touch on later), I overall have enjoyed my time watching WAVE and do think the show may find its way into my schedule somehow, even it the work I do with it for this project comes to a close.

Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #3 - The Sports WAVE

Welcome back to Sam’s Hot Takes, Season Two! On this ten minutes, we discover that stories about the local news we’re following net us ten points and subsequently spam them!

Lots of people are talking about it, and it’s clearly a problem with WAVE as well - wayyy too much sports coverage. Look, I get it, we’re a sports town. It’s important to a lot of people in our community to have coverage like this, but it’s the battle for balance we fight as journalists between elitism and populism… and WAVE’s losing it.

Our group typically sees about 4 sports stories a day from WAVE’s coverage each night. These stories are all extremely surface level, covering who’s playing who in the next U of L, Kentucky, or Louisville City game as well as dates and times. Perhaps it’d be better if they had some more insightful things to say? Some sort of columnist, or some predictions… but hey, what do I know? That’s just my take.

Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #2 - Critically Gone

Welcome back to Sam’s Hot Takes, Season Two! This’ll be another critique of a post from one of my classmates.
http://morgandvd.blogspot.com/2018/10/missing-girl-or-missing-news.html
While I initially enjoyed Morgan’s blog post, Missing Girl or Missing News?, after taking it apart a bit I quickly realized that it crumbles under pressure. My main criticism is this: it seems Morgan fails to make the distinction here between journalism for the purpose of informing people and journalism for the purpose of entertainment. The low-hanging fruit for these responses is to just call things not relevant on the national stage, but the problem with this is that it’s clearly not meant to be. True crime gathers so many clicks because, simply, it’s entertaining. Following a national mystery like this in the news is almost a journalistic tradition at this point, and I for one really enjoy coverage like this — even if it’s not entirely pertinent to my everyday life. That’s why I think that our critic is the person missing something here.

Sam’s Hot Takes S2, #1 - Missing the Mark

This is Sam Watkins’s Hot Takes, Season Two! We’re back with double the sass and double the procrastination, so just strap on in!
http://thedarksoldiersbarracks.blogspot.com/2018/10/wlkys-crime-addiction.html
In response to Justin’s article, WLKY’s Crime Addiction, I’ve got one simple point… where else does one expect these crime stories to be? Citizens of Louisville need to know when a high-profile local crime has occurred for their own safety, and the medium where these stories are conveyed is local news. While every single story may not be relevant to every single person, these crimes most definitely earn the spot they have on the news due to the impact these crimes have within the local communities they take place in. A local fight may be relevant to the families of everyone involved, the neighborhood it took place it, or really anyone who frequents the setting where the altercation took place. Therefore, to call these stories “bland” and “irrelevant” truly misses the mark.

Sam's Hot Takes #7 - Media Critique: "The Difference Between a Watchfox and a Watchdog"

      This is Samuel Watkins, providing you with yet another hot take tonight... but unfortunately, it'll also be my last. Here's the grand finale of my procrastination marathon, the media critique!
The article I'm critiquing is this one...
Politicians caught padding their resumes, from fake diplomas to biographical discrepancies by Jennifer Earl
...published by who else than Fox News. The standard that they violate here is fairness.  

      Firstly, it's worth mentioning that the article covers three Democratic politicians and only one Republican politician. The Republican politician's offense was also covered in the least detail compared to the other three offenses. This is at least somewhat defensible by its lonesome, and on its own could be mere coincidence. 
      However, looking deeper into the article, it's clearly trying to be watchdog journalism when that's just not what's happening here. One of the attacks on Democrat Andy Kim was that "he stated he worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations", but in actuality, "he only worked as a conflict management specialist for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for “less than a year” during the Bush era in 2005." 
      These attacks on these politicians are simply petty, and while the Republican covered in the article dropped out of her race for lying about having a college degree, all of the Democratic candidates covered here are still running in their elections. 
      Looking at this article, the bias is clear. It's a thinly veiled attack piece on Democratic candidates, passed off as 'watchdog journalism'. But hey... that's just my take.