WELCOME TO THE MEDIA MONITORING BLOG

Welcome to the Media Monitoring Blog of media systems around the world. This is an effort by the students of mass media to contribute to the understanding of national media systems. This semester we will be focusing on eight countries:

• Burma
• China
• Croatia
• Iran
• Italy
• Mexico
• Thailand
• Russia

Every week, students who are responsible for each of the countries would post a commentary, analysis, observation, historical fact, quote, video clip, newspaper article, etc concerning the media system on this blog. Most postings would likely to be inspired or prompted by something that has happened, is happening or likely to happen in that particular country.

As we know, a media system consists of many elements and is constantly being influenced by many factors including:

• The Cultural Characteristics (culture, religion, political heritage, etc) of the country
• The Media Philosophies of the country
• Media Law and Regulations in that country
• The various ways of Financing of media and the Ownership of the media
• The issue of Accessibility (related to Distribution) of the media
• News Reporting and Journalistic Norms of the country
• The Import and Export of the Media (related to Diversity of the Media)
• The Audience or the local consumer
• The Media Content itself (print, broadcast, Internet, new media, etc)
• World events, other national media systems, etc

Therefore, we can expect the Media Monitoring Blog to be a holistic and multi-faceted exercise in order to present a clearer picture of the particular media system.

How to navigate the Media Monitoring Blog:
Each posting will be labelled and these labels work as keywords for the reader to search through the blog. You would likely find the following keywords on the sidebar of this Blog:

Italy, Iran, Thailand, China, Russia, Mexico, Burma, Croatia, etc

Media Content, Laws, Population, Culture, Language, Banned, Hugo Chavez, Audience, Radio, Television, Internet, telenovela, Film, Blog,YouTube

Therefore, a reader looking for something related to Youtube being banned in Thailand would look for keywords (located on the siderbar of this Blog) such as:

"Thailand"
"Internet"
"YouTube"

and click on one of these keywords to find the relevant link.

Have fun reading and blogging!

Ming Kuok, LIM
Course Instructor