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Drs. Tudor Vlad, director of the Cox Center, and Jooyoung Kim, associate professor of advertising, accompanied the Business Public Communication Fellows to CNN, Atlanta, Ga. |
Grady Communication Fellows At CNN
“The competition for advertising money is intense, and Google and Facebook still hold the largest share of total US digital ad spend, with about 40 and 20 percent respectively, Tim Langmaid, CNN Vice President and senior editorial director, told a group of visitors on March 20th. “Their advantage is that they have a lot of information about their users. Once we, at CNN, are able to better know the preferences of our viewers, we make efforts to keep them with us longer by offering what they want, and hopefully that will also lead to increases in the ad revenue.”
Langmaid talked about the complexity of the broadcast landscape in the United States and about changes in the CNN news philosophy. He said that while in the past the channel’s main goal was to be the first one to break important news, now – due to the new technologies that enable individuals to distribute information almost in real time – CNN aims to be the place where people go to verify pieces of news and to get more in-depth coverage.
The visitors were Business and Public Communication Fellows participating in a one-year program organized by the Advertising and Public Administration Department of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and by the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia.
The Business and Public Communication Program at the University of Georgia (http://grady.uga.edu/bpc/) is coordinated by Dr. Jooyoung Kim, associate professor of advertising, and is designed to provide business and public communicators with opportunities to update and develop their professional knowledge and skills in a world class educational and research setting. More than 50 Fellows have graduated from the BPC program.
While being at CNN, the fellows also toured the newsrooms and asked questions about media coverage of the current U.S. administration and about journalism routines to check news accuracy and to avoid fake news. Some of them said that it would be useful to the television audiences to be better informed about such strategies in order to understand why legitimate news sources should be preferred to dubious Internet sites.
“The attention span of a TV viewer is very limited, and this is an important factor for the news selection and production process,” said Dr. Tudor Vlad, director of the Cox International Center. “However, becoming ‘prisoners’ of what and how the public want might be dangerous in the long term, and traditional media should probably re-examine their role and their future in a democratic society.
The fellows’ visit to CNN was organized by the Cox International Center, an outreach unit of the Grady College.
The visitors were: Hyun, Roh, deputy editor, Maeil Business Newspaper, South Korea; Jeong Ho, Lee, staff reporter at IT & Science Desk, Korea Economic Daily, South Korea; Taeyoung, Lee, project officer, Korean Institute of Industrial Technology, South Korea; Hyung Jun, Eom, senior reporter, The Segye Times, South Korea; Young Sam, Kim, director, Ministry of the Interior and Safety, South Korea; and Youngkwon, Choi , senior manager / Pfeiffer Vacuum, South Korea.
