Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2014
Capstone Advisor
Professor Hub Brown
Honors Reader
Professor Dan Pacheco
Capstone Major
Broadcast and Digital Journalism
Capstone College
Public Communications
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Professional
Subject Categories
Broadcast and Video Studies
Abstract
Headlines is a capstone project that attempts to test how to get the 18 to 21 year old demographic interested in news by showing the target audience that news around the world directly affects them in some way. My belief, based on personal experience and observation, is that many young adults do not pay attention to the news because they do not believe it plays a role in how their life plays out. The goal of Headlines is to show the target demographic that the opposite is true; world events do affect what happens in their daily lives.
This capstone project takes a scientific approach to figure out how to best reach and retain the attention of this 18 to 21 age demographic. It includes the question, hypothesis, experiment, and results, followed by a conclusion. The question is how to most effectively engage the college-age demographic in news. The hypothesis, based on personal experience and research, is that young adults need content that is interactive, to the point, and “soft news” into “hard news” based information (explained in the body of the paper). The experiment is the multimedia portion of the capstone. The results include online traffic, how methods to get viewers worked, as well as an explanation of methods that did not work and why I believe they did not work. The conclusion involves an analysis of the results.
Headlines is a three-part project: a research portion, a multimedia portion, and an analysis portion. The research encompasses more than two semesters’ worth of information. This research helped me decide what direction to take my capstone in, research on how to properly target my demographic, research on why my target demographic does not pay much attention to news, and other similar research concepts.
The multimedia portion includes a WordPress blog account , a Twitter account , a Facebook account
For the analysis, I explain the results of this experiment. I also explain where I think the future of news is heading based on both my experiment and based on my research and personal experience.
Recommended Citation
Landers, Caitlin, "Headlines: A Multimedia Approach to Getting 18 to 21 Year Olds Involved in News" (2014). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 773.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/773
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