assignment two: 

who owns whom? your assignment for this week is to explore the media ownership of our immediate area (california central coast).

1. pick one of the following media categories:
   • newspapers and magazines
   • radio
   • tv and cable
   you can find a list of local media on this page


2. use www.hoovers.com, the ownership tables and charts from the readings (e.g., columbia journalism review, the nation, mediachannel.org, etc.), the united states security and exchange commission (sec) filings, company websites, or any other resources you can find to discover the owning companies, the owner's owner's, etc. of each of the local media companies.


3. try to discover interrelationships between the local companies and their owning companies. do the same people sit on the boards of different companies? does a company own a significant stake of it competitor? look here for an example of how directing boards can interrelate: www.theyrule.net by future farmers


4. code these relationships up in a form that could be machine readable. you might chose to do this as an xml document, or you might simply choose to do this in a simple way -- an indented list with some notation for pointers will probably work just fine.


5. invent a graphical means of expressing this information. you might borrow ideas from one of the readings, you might find some software available online for charting out trees or graphs, or you might just sketch it out with pencil and paper.


6. post both (a) your coded relationships and (b) your graphical representation of these ownership relationships to your course webpage. if your graphical representation is not in digital form, please scan it in so that we can look at it in class.