LR: "The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production."

Question: The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. Discuss the arguments for and against this view.

WWW: Wow – this is seriously impressive! Not only have you taken on challenging concepts and theories such as hyper-reality but you’ve applied them with very good critical autonomy. We absolutely need to be aiming for an A* but there are still a few aspects to work on before I’d confidently predict this top grade. In terms of the strengths of the essay there are almost too many to list: a wide variety of excellent examples – including very recent (e.g. Trump and the alt-right), theories and debates explored in depth (e.g. the regulation, censorship and ethics of new media), statistics, use of media terminology. Keep this up!

EBI: One initial point – you’ve made a common mistake that you definitely need to avoid in future. Rodney King was filmed on an old chunky camcorder, not a camera phone. I can assure you they didn’t have camera phones in 1992! If you want a significant event that marked the start of widespread citizen journalism you can use the 2005 London bombings – iconic images taken by survivors of walking out of tunnels to safety.  I think you’ve misunderstood Gramsci’s hegemony and will need to revise this again. It’s certainly not part of the pluralist perspective – it’s a Marxist view for how the elite control the masses. The idea is that they control people through consent rather than force or violence and the media is a major factor in this.

The main feedback I would give you regards organisation, paragraph structure and answering the question. There’s no doubt you do answer the question in superb depth but the length of your paragraph means you sometimes meander off topic a little and it can be difficult to navigate the thread of the essay. Some of your paragraphs are over 600 words! You need to divide and organise your key ideas into shorter paragraphs – it’ll make it much easier for your examiner to follow your argument. For example, you cover the decline in the newspaper industry, Pluralism, News Values and Alain de Botton in one paragraph. Surely this could be two or even three paragraphs?

In terms of question focus, always keep an eye on those key words in the question (“consumption and production”). I think your essay would have been a bit easier to follow with regular use of these key words.

Finally, one minor point: you need to clearly introduce your case study in your introduction (impact of NDM on news).

LR: Create a list of key revision topics from our new/digital case study work this term based on your essay and feedback above. Revise these topics over Christmas for your January MEST3 Section B assessment.

I will revise my essay and the media stories and examples included in order to reproduce this for the actual exam

Go back to your essay and experiment with dividing up those paragraphs into separate ideas with sharper topic sentences that clearly focus on the question.