Listservs

During the course of this assignment, I have subscribed to three listservs. All of them pertain to movies in some way, but they have little to do with my actual subject: the academy awards. This was one of the difficulties I faced during this assignment. I couldn't really find anything that was about the Academy Awards.

In fact, there were very few that pertained to movies or cinema at all. One of the listservs that I found talked about Matt Damon...a lot. Another one only talked about foreign films. The only problem with that was that it had one subscriber. A couple of listservs that I subscribed to were actually interesting. One of them talked about obscure films. That one was really interesting because I learned about some films that I never knew about. That one is known as "Cinema Obscura."

Another listserv, "Movie Mania," had very few subscribers, but it was one of the only listservs that I could actually use. It listed the titles of each subscribers favorite movie. Some of them were nominated or won Academy Awards, so it allowed me to do a little research for some of the titles. Most were simply mainstream films that little to do with my subject.

Overall, doing this assignment was fairly difficult. I had trouble after I subscribed to each listerv. For some unknown reason, after I subcribed, I was unable to find the archives for each listerv. I'm not sure if they disappeared or if I did something wrong. I would log in, and try to access the archives, but each time I got a message saying that I was unauthorized to access the archives.

Online News Evaluation Update

My subject is the 2009 Academy Awards, which is known for recognizing the best in cinema. This project was pretty difficult for me. I tried really hard to find some good information, but the search engines that I used (google, yahoo, ask jeeves) did not want give it to me. One of the major difficulties that I have faced during this assignment is finding articles that didn't repeat themselves. Every other article that I found just listed the nominees and nothing more. Seeing the same information over and over again became really frustrating, so much so that I felt like changing my topic. But I decided to stick with it, and I began to find some really interesting articles. For instance, I found one article about how "The Dark Knight" was snubbed from a best picture nomination. The article posed a good question; if "The Dark Knight was nominated for best picture, would that have a positive effect on the Oscars TV ratings?" I slowly gathered one article after another until I had enough to write about. I started finding articles that talked about the business of the awards ceremony, and the actors who were nominated. I found out about their early careers, and I even found some Oscar history. Overall, I learned a lot. Despite my difficulties, I ended up gaining some knowledge. At this point, I'm still researching for a couple more articles.