Our little corner booth in the global supermarket of ideas passed a significant threshold today: 100 posts. Not by design, but just as part of the flow of those ideas, the post that set the mark was not from one of the regulars here but from a guest, Ashley Turner.
Ashley is just one of 29 students who are part of the International Media program at American University. Although the blog is open to all of those students and faculty too, only a handful of us are regular contributors for now. (And of course the whole internet world may read and comment on the blog.) But we certainly appreciate having contributions from the wider group of informed perspectives. Her post, “The Media & South Korean Public Diplomacy” looks at the intersection between popular culture (The K-Pop movement or Korean pop music along with Korean cinema) and national cultural policy as a projection of a state’s soft power image.
Beyond the editors, the most prolific writers here are Gabby LaVerghetta and Becky Mezzanotte. Gabby’s most popular posting with readers is “Europe: Are the Media Framing Italy’s Mario Monti for Success or Failure?”. Becky’s most popular posting is “Film Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.“
Lest you think that the blog lingers a bit too much on Eurocentric topics, given that short list, the most popular post on the blog is about both Africa and the developed world’s stereotypes surrounding that continent and its problems. That is reflected in Ginnie Seger’s posting “Define Necessity: Reporting or Exploitation.”
One of our blog’s alums, Jessica Andrews has the next popular posting “Cinque Terre’s Flood Reveals the Power of Non-Traditional News Sources” which returns us to Europe. But what this shows is that the blog truly does have a global view from Asia to Africa to Europe. The readers and writers both seem to like that.
And although other academic blogs might have hit the centennial mark two or three times as fast, that hasn’t seemed to matter much here as the audience has grown nicely and also comes from all around the world. We encourage you to keep reading (and perhaps commenting here and there). If you do so, we’ll keep writing.
(The photo is by Mike Baker — PhotoMojoMike — of Edinburgh, Scotland via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.)
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