OSP: Teen Vogue & The Voice month in focus

OSP: Teen Vogue & The Voice month in focus

One of the key aspects for your Media Paper 2 essay on Teen Vogue and The Voice will be a range of relevant and interesting articles from these websites.

We recommend putting this homework into your timetable so you have a regular slot you complete it every week - as we'll be doing this again later in the year for the newspapers topic.

The details: for the next month, you must find a weekly news story from Teen Vogue and The Voice and read, summarise and comment on them on your blog (A*-B candidates will do more).

Teen Vogue
The Voice

You'll also find stories related to the media linked from our Twitter account, @blogmacguffin (access it online here if you don't have the Twitter app) so make sure you're following that too.

Most importantly, you need to do the following on your blog for each story...

1. Provide the title and weblink;
2. Include a relevant image, graphic or screenshot;
3. Summarise the story in your own words;
4. Explain how or why this story appeals to an audience (use media terminology and theory here);
5. Comment on the story: to what extent does it reflect the values and ideologies of the website? Is this an example of quality journalism or simply clickbait? 

You'll be presenting these to the class each week (we'll randomly select a student and you'll be expected to present from memory, so make sure you come prepared) and this will ensure you build up an archive of stories from the CSP texts to widen your media knowledge base and provide examples to use in exam questions and essays. 

What will this look like? Although this was for a slightly different task for the old specification Year 13 exam, this blog post from one of our previous Media students gives you an idea of what a valuable resource these stories quickly become.

I'm a Young Black Activist in Georgia. I Don't See Voting As the Only Answer.

·         Talks about an activist who believes that the path to liberation is not by voting but by learning the icons that have changed the future

o   Martin Luther King – Civil rights leader

o   Rosa Park – anti-rape activist

o   Dorothy Bolden – civil rights champion

·         What was most important was their commitment to deep care for the people

·         Studied African American studies in University – made her realise the failure in the US government

o   Inspired by organisers who spoke about the refusal to vote

·         She states that for historical standpoint – black people should have no allegiance to a specific party, but to better freer future and harm reduction

·         Other classmates had witnessed the devastation that the “war on drugs” caused for Black people, and remembered Hillary Clinton referring to young Black men as “super-predators.”

gHow does this appeal to an audience

The story is mostly left wing/Liberal allowing activists to express themselves and also introduce the every day situations in the media. This appeals to a younger audience as living in the technological era, people are following amateurism  similar with this article

‘There is a lot of fake medication in Nigeria’: How one charity is providing trusted treatments

·         States that nearly 1/3 of the medication in Nigeria are fake said by the WTO.

o   Due to this issue one London-based charity – International Health partner – is helping distribute safe medicines.

·         Scheme is to take basic medicines abroad in facilitating medical clinic and training.

o   The packs are portable with 800 medicines

·         Paul discovered Essential Health Packs only recently. “Previously we would purchase supplies from a pharmaceutical company in Nigeria, [which was] a huge expense,” he said. “Working with International Health Partners allows us to do much more for much less.”

·         “There is a lot of fake medication in Nigeria, and patients find that the medicines they buy don’t work. People can’t always trust what they are taking. In some cases, there is nothing more than chalk in the packet.”

·         Muhammad Saddiq (UK based surgeon) made a journey to Nigeria treating more than 400 patients

·         One pregnant women had stepped on a nail and had been heavily infected but unfortunately she was too poor to seek medical attention.

o   Muhammad Saddiq had cleaned out cow dung (a local remedy), removed necrotic tissues and antibiotics at a local hospital.

o   “The turnout was massive and we had to disappoint some people,” said Muhammad.

o   “Part of the reason we had huge turnouts was because people in that region generally don’t believe medicines in shops are effective. Because these medicines [came from inside] the UK [supply chain], they could trust them.”

How it appeals to the audience?

The voice is non-traditional similar to Teen Vogue expressing everyday situations like medical conditions in Nigeria. Due to most people being left-wing, it appeals to the audience furthermore allowing them to have a voice in this era and expressing their views and thoughts of situations like this.