Media assignment

Another interesting challenge today was for a Media and Society assignment. The student needed to find out who produced a media artifact (she chose a Dixie Chicks album) and track down who was the ultimate parent company. She also needed company info and some idea of how profits are shared in the industry.

We used a handy-dandy site called Who Owns What to figure out who owned the company (in her case it was SONY BMG, which is a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann). We looked up those two parents in LexisNexis and found Hoover reports (they're predicting a divorce, by the way). I also showed her Business Source Premier and Proquest Newsstand (which has the Wall Street Journal, unlike L/N.) Oddly enough, Communication and Mass Media Complete was less useful than I expected.

I don't know how many are in that class, but there may be more questions about this. It's a short paper, but they need to cite at least ten sources.