Searchlights and Sunglasses Chapter 1: Guided Reading Questions

1) The Knight News Challenge is a 25 million dollar initiative to invest in breakthrough ideas in news and information and the first of the Knight Foundation's digital efforts in regard to training journalists. An example of a successful project funded by the Knight News Challenge is DocumentCloud. 2) The four major phases of communication throughout history are the visual, language, mass media, and digital ages. 3) The innovation that started the phase of mass media was the movable metal type invention in Europe. 4) The name of the first generation of American media consumers is the Republican Generation. The form of media popular in that generation was pamphlets. 5) The three eras following the first generation of American news consumers were the Compromise (characterized by the new media of partisan weekly newspapers), Transcendental (characterized by populist daily newspapers like The Penny Press), and Gilded (characterized by the Associated Press and the telegraph) Generations. 6) World War 3.0 refers to a war taking place in cyberspace that has already begun and shall continue with countries already armed and ready with cyber armies. It is the first invisible war with the potential to alter it. 7) The name of the four generations that will follow the digital age are the Cyber (characterized by intelligent media with the cloud, grids, robotics, and artificial intelligence), Visionary (characterized by bio media with augmented reality, nanotechnology, media implants, and enhanced human capacity), Hybrid (characterized by hyper media with cranial downloads, thought aggregators, and sentient environment), and Courageous (characterized by thought projection, telepathy, teleportation, and telekenisis) Generations. 8) According to the author, news literacy is important to college students because this among the other 21st century forms of literacy are essential to survive in the world of modern media. 9) The disadvantage of having news that is more portable and personal than ever before is that it puts one into a digital cocoon where one is exposed only to the news that interests them and is unaware of the harsh realities they block from their news orbit. 10) The solutions to the current state of journalism offered by the four reports highlighted by the author are to have traditional newspapers become more digitally friendly and less focused on competition while sharing information with other papers instead, to have the government initiate nonprofit news organizations, etc.