Sports Illustrated

When you open up a Sports Illustrated you will find yourself in stories that revolve around all different types of sports. Depending on what time of the year you are reading the magazine in, you will be looking at a lot of stories related to the time of year. For example, in the last month there have been a lot of stories surrounding the NFL playoffs and Superbowl. The stories are all about sports and sports related things from youth to professional ranks. Sports Illustrated focuses on big and small stories for all sports and all ages. They have reporters for every sport that focus on getting any story that is important enough for a fan to see and read. Ben and I both that Sports Illustrated would be a good magazine to review because we both read it on a regular basis.

The magazine is organized the same way every week, with certain reports/journalists getting their stories put in the same area every week. Dan Patrick interviews different people every week from sports stars to celebrities about different things involving sports. Throughout the issue you will find it put into different sections with your main headline articles being put in the middle with filler stories around it. Depending on the article and the journalist you will find them being roughly the same length, depending on whether it is a headline article or not. There is a good mix of long and short articles throughout the whole magazine. The website is set up in a very easy to navigate way, with tabs taking you to different sports with stories pertaining to that particular sport.

Throughout the magazine you will find photos to go along with the stories, and it is all in color and has a very good mix of action and still photos that fit with the type of story. The website also offers a photos section where you can separate them by the event and particular sport that it might be involved with. There is a lot of advertising involved with the magazine and online, which are geared towards mostly males with ads such as cologne, NFL gear, drivers, and TV shows. In both the medias there are enough advertisements to get your attention, but not too many that they take over the page and annoy you. They are subtle ads but they are geared well enough towards men, that we feel they would get recognized fairly easily but their target market. This is a good magazine for advertisements for the reason that they can gear it towards a very specific groups of people that would be interested in those ads.

There are not a lot of differences in the two different medias, which include a good mixture of all different types of stories that appeal to the masses. The only difference that we were able to find would be the amount of stories that are available to you when to go online. When you look online you can find stories that are more of a headline story that only comes with about a paragraph of story. One of the other differences is how easy it is to navigate around on the website, which is just a click and read style versus having to flip through the pages and find articles that appeal to you. Overall they are the same stories with just a bigger quantity of them available online. Another good thing about reading the stories online is how much quicker you can get the up-to-date stories that are just happening versus the magazine where you can only get certain stories that are chosen to be put in and you have to wait for the magazine to come once a week.

Sports Illustrated magazine is different than its competitor ESPN, mainly in the fact that it is delivered every week versus every two weeks. ESPN and Sports Illustrated are very similar in everything that they do from the magazines to the layout of the websites. The websites are very similar in their layout and typically have the same stories, just written in different ways by different people. The thing about sports journalism is that you cant really put a lot of opinion in the stories because a lot of things are based on stats and facts, so it is hard for SI to make itself very different from its competition.

There are two really good things about the print on online version of SI, which are that the magazine is distributed once a week and still manages to put together good stories that are easy and interesting to read. One of the other pros to SI is how easy the website is to navigate around in. The website is very straight forward and very user friendly which makes it easy for anyone to come on and use. Two of the bad things about SI are that there is a so called "Cover Jinx" where if you get put on the cover of SI then you do not preform well or live up to the hype that was given to you or your team. One of the other downsides that we found to it was that there is not a lot of variety as far as the structure of the magazine. It can be considered a good thing by some but little differences now and again make it more exciting to read.

When we looked at this magazine and the website we kind of got the feeling that it was geared towards men. The main reason that we got that impression was from the advertisements that are used throughout both, which as talked about earlier appeal to men very well. The ads can be somewhat placed in random areas of both medias, but for the most part they are not out of place with who they are trying to reach. There is probably some method to the way that they do it, which could just be how much people pay, but all in all they do a good job of keeping the ads subtle and not distracting you too much from the stories you are trying to read. Because of the vast variety in the readers, they have to keep their information and stories very neutral and unbiased towards one side of the spectrum or argument.

We found after looking at both and with me being a subscriber to SI magazine, that the online version is better from the standpoint that it is more up to date and easy to navigate to specific sports or stories that you may be interested in. We think that overall the website serves the audience better as well because it is easy to get to and as I said before it is easy to get to exact sports and/or stories that you want to see. The magazine is still very good for what it is, it just gets overpowered by the website by the sheer amount of stories and information that is available to you online versus in print.

Besides just getting the magazine, Ben and I both look at SI.com on a very regular basis to keep up with sports and scores. They also offer a mobile version which allows you to see the website and get important stories sent to your phone for and scores and sports that you wish to keep in touch with. I personally am a mobile SI user and find it to be really easy to use and makes it easier then getting online on my computer to keep in touch with the sports world.

From reading this magazine for a long time, I have become to realize how much it closely resembles ESPN. You are either a ESPN guy or a Sports Illustrated guy as far as which magazine you read. ESPN has an edge over SI with the fact that they have their own TV network as well so there is a lot more money and people behind it. I believe that SI is good because it focuses on every story for every sport, just because it is not important to one person doesn't mean the same for the next guy. Everyone has a favorite team that they want to hear every story about, which SI does a good job of making it easy to see and exciting to read for everyone.

Parks and Recreation: the Ron Swanson Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULAfBllREZs

-Ron Swanson

"Parks and Recreation" airs Thursday nights at 9:30 on NBC, following "The Office." It follows a standard half hour sitcom format about the Parks and Recreation Department of small-town Pawnee, IN. The show stars Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, Deputy Parks Director, whose naive optimism often works against her. In this week's episode, however, her hard work ethic was displayed as she fought the flu to make a crucial speech at a town hall meeting in an effort to save the Parks Department, which is under the guillotine--an immediate allusion to our sinking economy and the scramble to stay afloat. Knope proposes to reinstate the town festival to stimulate business by enriching community interaction.

The show is filmed like the "The Office," a scripted reality-style parody in which the characters act as though they're regular people, aware of being filmed, without a laugh track. Most scenes are filmed in studio and phony interviews are staged with the actors like a reality show. This makes it very different from other sitcoms, though very much like "The Office."

Advertisements during the show consist of Glide floss, Toyota cars, Pizza Hut,  Merci chocolates, Geico insurance, etc. which lines up well with the target audience of middle class working people between 25 and 55.

Sterotypes are ultimately what make this show funny. Not racial stereotypes, as the show somewhat lacks diversity--one of it's weaknesses--but particularly concerning politics. Leslie Knope plays an upbeat, aloof progressive who won the homosexual vote in the town by marrying two male penguins at the zoo. She is constantly at odds with her mustachioed, staunch libertarian boss Ron Swanson, played by Nick Offerman, who openly professes his loathing for all government, including his own job, and whose ringtone is a shotgun blast.  A major strength of the show is that the episodes often end with Ron softening up to Leslie's ideas for park programs; the writer's effort to portray "reaching across the aisle," a major issue right now, especially since the Arizona shootings.

Ron Swanson has become a breakout character because of his neolithic stunts like grilling steaks and bacon inside his office, and his classic conservative Man's Man one-liners, like--on nutrition "fishing is for sport only; fish meat is practically a vegetable."

JJ and I engage with this show by watching weekly--and by quoting Ron Swanson. For instance, after this episode my fiancee read from her cousin's Facebook page: "Capitalism: God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor," and I instructed her to reply with another Swanson quote. Her cousin is very conservative and though he is usually laughing with Ron Swanson and I am usually laughing at him, we are both laughing (crossing the aisle on issues).

We hadn't analyzed this in depth before this assignment, so this was a great learning experience. It was very interesting to consider the commercials in terms of the target audience, and also to analyze the show and some of the references behind the writing, like bi-partisanship. If  I were from a foreign country I would probably interpret this portrayal of U.S. culture as being confused but earnest, and conflicted but good-hearted.

Critics have been harsh on the show, particularly Amy Poehler's main character Leslie Knope, accusing her character of being flat and unoriginal, but Rob Lowe has been a great addition to the cast this season and Ron Swanson has been well-recieved as a supporting character. I will admit that this show is an acquired taste and I wasn't impressed during the first season, but it worked it's way back into my diet because of it's time slot after "The Office." Now I believe the writers have found their stride and improved the substance of the show. Though I must point out that complaining about beefy substance in a sitcom is like complaining about fish meat not being filling enough--it's practically a vegetable.

"I was born ready. I'm Ron f***ing Swanson."


Thanks to YouTube for all the above clips.