Final Paper

Nick Lopez

Ann Marie-Yerks

Comp. 106

27 April 2009

Life After the Baby Boom Generation

First it was the baby boom generation, now terms like “First Digitals,” “Echo Boom,” “Generation Y,” and “Millennials” are used in popular culture to describe those people born between 1981 and 1997. Sometimes people also use the term “Net Generation” because of the closeness to the “Dotcom” boom. While there is not much that distinguishes all of these terms from one another, there are several similar characteristics, attributes, and qualities define this age group. There are also numerous stereotypes that have come attached to this age group. For example, the ability to multitask better and overall increased knowledge is some ideas that older people perceive on Generation Y. However, sometimes gender and race can violate these stereotypes and expectations.

All of these terms contain the offspring of the Baby Boom generation. However it really depends on the location of the people you are referring to when using the term “Generation Y”. This is because most of the time, a generation is defined by the media, popular culture, and even members of the generation; so I think there can not be any exact time period which defines any generation. For example, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, many rich countries in the Middle East experienced a drop in birth rate. In Southern Europe and some parts of Japan, the “Y” generation is notably smaller and most of their extended families are small as well. In the 1980’s the Soviet Union experienced a huge growth in births, much like the United States did. However they went through a large decrease in the 90’s. In parts of Eastern Europe Generation Y is the first generation that does not have memories of communism any type of dictator rule. In other very populous countries like China and India, Generation Y was the first generation to experience better goods and services due to a change in their economy.

While Generation Y alludes to the relationship to Generation X, the term “Echo Boomer” is used to relate the size of the generation and its relation to the Baby Boomers. The actual "Echo Boom" happened in a five year span between 1989 and 1993 when for the first time since 1964, the number of births got to reach over four million (Strauss, Howe). The term "First Digitals" refers to the generation first attaining digital social interaction, and experiencing its opportunities and limitations. “First Digitals” are people born in the late 1970’s until the late 1980’s. They more than likely finished high school and went through some college or finished college. They also adapted to, and used digital technologies and social networking websites like myspace, facebook, and twitter. According to Howe and Strauss, the birth years of the Millennial Generation are 1982 to 2001. They also bring up a good point in that the media and others used the graduation class of 2000 to make a contrast between people born before this class, and those born after. This term simply relates the young age of the generation at the new millennium in the year 2000.

“Trophy generation” and “Trophy Kids” are terms that are used for the Millennials. This term stems from the occurrences in organized youth sports. Most of the time “No one loses” and every participant are rewarded with a “participation trophy”. This raises a huge problem. Most people would think that this generation, rich in technology and education, would make the perfect workers, the opposite is being reported from people human resources departments. It has been reported that employers are starting to become concerned with the fact that people in the Millennial generation have a very high expectation of what should be given to them at an entry level job, and the desire to make their job fit their lives, rather than adapt to life in the workplace. This reminds me of the characters in Microserfs. Sometimes they worked for 16 hours and had to adapt to that lifestyle (Coupland).

“According to a new survey from CareerBuilder.com and Harris Interactive, Gen Y workers want better pay, a flexible work schedule and company-provided BlackBerrys and cell phones” (Balderrama). I was not very surprised at this, because I would be the same way. Young people do not care about seniority, and some are ignorant about it. Some research studies indicate that the millennial generation's great expectations stem from feelings of superiority. Michigan State University's Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MonsterTrak, an online careers site, did a research study of 18 to 28 year olds and found that nearly half had moderate to high superiority beliefs about themselves. Responses such as "I deserve favors from others" and "I know that I have more natural talents than most", is what the superiority factor was measured by. But the big companies and firms know that hiring generation Y applicants is their best bet to help them stay competitive in the economy. This is after all, the generation that had cell phones in high school when everyone thought it was unnecessary. As a result, fifteen percent of employers are “modifying their policies in order to appease their Gen Y employees. Of those employers who made changes, 57 percent implemented more flexible work schedules and 33 percent created new recognition programs” (Balderrama).

I think that the expectation for little kids to be successful has risen tremendously. I think this is the reason why they use the term “Trophy Kids”. Millennials are truly "Trophy Kids," the pride and joy of their parents. The millennials are greatly praised and often received trophies when they excelled, and sometimes when they didn't, to avoid damaging their self-esteem. They and their parents have placed a high premium on success, filling résumés with not only academic accomplishments but also sports and other extracurricular activities. From a personal experience, I always hated being a “trophy kid”. I did not like getting a trophy when I lost in something, I always felt like it gave me a false sense of accomplishment. I’m not sure how many people would agree with me when I say that little kids should not be given “participation” trophies. Kids should be rewarded when they win, and encouraged to become better when they lose. Doing this would make for the kids to have more realistic expectations later in life once they enter the work field.

Works Cited

Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. N.p.:
Harper Perennial, 1992.

Balderrama, Anthony. "Generation Y: Too demanding at work?" www.cnn.com. 26 Dec. 2007. 27 Apr. 2009
.

Facebook Quiz

Which superhero or villain are you?

1) What is your preferred arsenal?
• Knives
• High tech weapons
• Your own hands
• Mind control

2) Do you wear armor?
• Yes
• No, but I wear tights
• No, I just eat people
• Yes, made of pure gold

3) Do you go out during the day, or the night?
• Both
• Only day
• Only Night
• During dawn and dusk

4) Where do you live?
• Miami
• New York
• Chicago
• Tokyo

5) What color is your mask?
• Black with glowing eyes
• I don’t need a mask
• Pink and Purple
• Red and blue

6) What's your day job?
• Scientist
• Cab driver
• Journalist
• Politician

7) What do people think of you?
• I’m mysterious
• I do more damage than good
• They fear me
• Loved by all
8) There is a giant building in your way, what do you do?
• Fly over
• Use a grappling hook
• Dig under it
• Walk around it

Podcast Script

The Sports Show

Complete Show Length in Minutes: 6 min 15 sec

Episode 1: Topic: The new age of sports agents.

Intro Music Clip: Title: “Remember the Name” by Fort Miner Time: 30 sec

Intro: What does a sports agent do? : Time: 1min

Welcome to the sports show! Thanks for tuning in! I’m Nick Lopez and today we’re going to be talking about the interesting career of a sports agent. Now most of you sports fans have heard of these agents, but may not know exactly what they do. Well basically, a sports agent is someone that represents any professional athlete in terms of contract negotiations and dealing with the media. They also help out in endorsement deals for the player and sometimes can handle all finical material such as taxes. For this reason, some agents have business degrees and law backgrounds. The agent usually gets around four to ten percent commission of the player’s contract. Some agents are part of a large company, such as IMG headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. Others are independent agents.
Segment Music Clip: Title: “Heart of a Champion” by Nelly Time: 20 sec

Segment: Difficulty of a sports agent job: 2 1/2 min

It is easy to overlook the difficulty of a career as a sports agent, in particular, getting your foot in the door. This is a huge business that has many people competing for the best clients. The pressure to get the most talented clients is so high, that often times agents break the rules and try to bribe these athletes with expensive gifts such as cars, and even brand new homes, in the hopes of that athlete signing with the agent. One incident that made quite a stir, was former University of Southern California running back, Reggie Bush, who accepted bribes, which included a brand new home in San Diego, from an agent that he later signed with. Per NCAA rules, a player cannot accept any type of gift whatsoever from any agent or outside person. Since Bush was still in college at the time, his national championship that he won at USC, could become void, like it never happened, if the court rules so. This is very similar to the University of Michigan “Fab Five” basketball players back in the early 1990’s. Some of the players on the team accepted money from an outside source. As punishment, the team’s final four tournament appearances were ruled void, and the banners that once hung from the rafters in the Chrysler Arena, were taken down. So as you can see, there is plenty of pressure that comes with this job. Another thing to consider is honesty and sincerity. An agent’s reputation can get easily ruined for years by word of mouth from the players. A lot of agents only want to make a buck. They negotiate a multiyear deal, and you don't hear from them again for months. And with so many clients, sometimes it can be hard for an agent to be fully dedicated to every single player, although it is expected from them. Of course with anything, there is always luck involved. The key is to be able to pick out the talent early on, before other agents spot the player’s true talent. It’s a skill very few have completely mastered. My interviewee, who wished to remain anonymous, idolized Drew Rosenhaus, one of the most popular NFL agents. Rosenhaus, a University of Miami graduate, used his college connections to sign some of the most talented and popular players in the league right now. Kellen Winslow Jr., Frank Gore, and Willis McGahee, all Miami graduates, are some of Rosenhaus’s clients. He was fortunate enough to have early connections and get jumpstarted in his career. He now owns his own Agency Company in Florida. This just shows that having any edge over other agents can be tremendously beneficial.
End Segment Music Clip: Title: “I get Money” by 50 Cent Time: 25 sec


Ending: Increase in pay? : 1min

Some people have the conception that sports agents are just rolling around in money, when a survey done by ESPN.com found that fewer than 5 percent of all agents net more than $100,000 a year. My interviewee said about agent’s wages that, “I believe that as athletes become bigger, faster, and stronger, there will be higher paid contracts, and as a result, agents will demand a higher commission percentage.” I agree with some of this statement, the part I disagree on, is that with the exception of the MLB, every other major sport league has a salary cap. A salary cap is a fixed amount by the league that a team can not go over, when paying players. This is to keep the league competitive and not have the most talented team, the team that has the most money to spend. An example of no salary cap can be illustrated clearly by the New York Yankees. They had a payroll close to $225 million during the 2008 season. They are always in the playoffs because of this, and in my opinion, this is not fair to other teams who do not have such rich owners. Professional athletes are only going to get more talented and hopefully for my interviewee, that will result in more money. That does it for this weeks episode, thanks for tuning in! See you next time!

Ending Music Clip: Title: “Remember the Name” by Fort Miner Time: 30 sec

Project 2: Final Draft Changes

For this assignment, I felt that only had to make a few changes to the final draft. Sometimes when we read our own writing, we feel that it flows perfectly, so it is good to have someone else read it and get their opinion. Doing this, I was able to change a few words around so that it is easily read. Too often, I find myself making the same grammar mistakes. So I hope that the more people I get to read my writing, the more often I can prevent these mistakes. Also, on the actual word document, I had to double space the sentences, because when I posted the blog post for the draft, having spaces would take up far too much room. I was also debating on whether or not to actually make a true “conclusion” paragraph at the end. The way I have it now, the last paragraph is about the last article I read, but at the end of the paragraph I have about 2 or 3 “conclusion” sentences that wrap everything up, and bring it all together. At first I thought this could possibly be a bad thing, but then I felt that since the whole paper was about the same topic, it would still fit together nicely. Overall, I really didn’t have to change that much, as I really tried to make it best as possible on the first draft.

Shape Poem

I chose to do a song for this assignment. I picked “I’ll be missing you” by Sean “P.Diddy” Combs. This song was dedicated to the Nortorious B.I.G., aka, Christopher Wallace. He and Combs had a very good friendship while they were in the music business. In 1997, Wallace was shot to death, and in June 1997, Combs made this song as a tribute to his friend. Every single person can relate to this song because we have all lost someone near and dear to us at some point. I shaped the lyrics of his song in the shape of a cross. Being a Christian, the cross is a very important symbol for me, as it is for all Christians. When we go through something as tough as losing a loved one, we ask God to give us the strength to overcome the emotional pain it causes us. I understand not everyone is the same religion, but since both Combs and Wallace are and were Christians themselves, I felt it was appropriate.

Project 2 Draft

Since my major is communications, I wanted to select a topic that will relate to something I could be doing in the future. Communications is a pretty broad field, so I had to narrow my choice down, and I picked articles that talked about broadcast journalism. To make it even more appealing to me, I picked the articles that were about sports broadcasting, the NFL in particular. Reading these really gave me a clearer understanding of how broadcasting works, and how the NFL gets paid by these networks to broadcast the games on Sunday.

The first article I read was entitled “Football on Fox Will Mean More Local News”. This was written way back in 1994, and tells about how the new up and coming network (FOX) outbid CBS, and as a result, now gets to carry and broadcast the NFL’s National Football Conference (NFC) games. Fox bid $1.6 billion to the NFL. The author (Lou Prato) then goes on to state that because there are now two networks broadcasting games on Sunday, there will be more local news programs. The reason is because during the time period when the “home team” game is not being played, the network has to fill the gap with something, and this is usually a news program. Fox knew that in order to be a complete network and compete for ratings, their affiliates had to start broadcasting more local news programs. It was very interesting reading this article because it was when Fox just started up, and how they were not yet considered a top network. Fox hoped to use the great prestige of the NFL to boost their ratings and make them a respectable network. They were exciting about the fact that a younger demographic was going to be exposed to the local news, which in turn would give them more viewers. I also learned about Ultra High Frequency (UHF) and Very High Frequency (VHF). These are signals that televisions use. When Fox started out, its problem was that most of its affiliates broadcasted on UHF which is not as powerful as VHF, and has a weaker signal. However, cable televisions helped cure this problem, because cable does not depend on the signal to work. It was also interesting to find out how much money these networks lose when they get outbid by another network, and also how much is affected by it. Small local businesses can get affected because they may not be able to air their commercials due to a change in the television lineup, or they might experience a drop in viewers because no game is being broadcasted. It also made me realize how much of an affect it can have if the schedule of a single program was changed by an hour.

The next article I read talked about exactly that. Again, by the same author, it describes the affects on ABC and its affiliates due to the change in time to Monday Night Football. The time change was 9pm Eastern Standard Time, to 8pm Eastern Standard time. The reason why ABC did this was to start their news programs around 11:15 when the game ended, as compared to the midnight start when the game used to begin at 9pm. Now most people, including myself, are not aware of everything that gets affected by this. For starters, all of the stations on the west coast will be negatively affected. Darrell Brown, vice president and general manager of KGTV in San Diego says, “It sucks, we not only lose our 5 o'clock news but now, after the game, we're going to have a problem holding an audience until our 11 o'clock news.” And according to Brown, it is very difficult to come up with something to fill in a weekly gap. According to Prato, it cost about $550 million each year to broadcast Monday Night Football, a price that the network asked its affiliates to help pay. In some proposals that were made to help pay this, the affiliates would give the network additional air time to sell advertising or just ante up cash. Clearly, there is a lot of money involved in the broadcast business, and can make for a very prosperous career for some people.

The third and final article I read was entitled “Strategic Sports Communication”. It is an article describing a textbook that helps people get a feel for a career in the sports industry. The author, John Sweeney, starts by stating out some money figures. For example he says, “The sports industry has grown from $50.2 billion in 1987 to an estimated size of over $200 billion today.”, and, “The top five sports advertisers spend over $700 million a year; the leading networks pay over $2 billion for the media rights to the NFL alone.” He attracts attention by throwing out these big numbers. This helped me understand how much money is really involved in broadcasting, and what a career in this field can do for me. One of interesting parts of this article, is the point that the author makes, he brings up the fact that the sports industry is one of the top ten most profitable industries in the country, group that with the broadness of the communications field and you have a career that can be very beneficial and pleasurable for someone that enjoys sports.

Project Reflection

Being a huge sports fan, I could not wait to do this project. People always told me, “Write about what you know”. So naturally, I picked the topic about professional athletes and whether or not they should be role models. I think it is human nature for kids to look up to movie stars, musicians, and professional athletes. In the past, kids used to look up to police officers, firefighters, and doctors, but now with all the fame, glamour, and money, it is rare to see a child idolize one of those professions over an athlete or a movie star. Now in all fairness, there are athletes who are the definition of a bad example, and a bad role model, but we should not judge all of them based on the mistakes of a few. The same can be said for lawyers and police officers for example. There are crooked lawyers and officers in every city, whether we want to believe it or not. Unfortunately, the media only emphasizes the bad part of professional sports. The second a high profile athlete makes some type of controversy, the media is all over it. I can name several examples. In 2003, Kobe Bryant was accused of raping a girl in Colorado; for weeks, all people saw on television was Kobe in court, and negative things said about him. In 2007, Michael Vick was all over the news for his dog fighting crime, which he is now in prison for. The seriousness of that crime justifies the extensive coverage though. But very seldom do we ever see the positive things that athletes do, simply because the media does not find it an appealing story. It is also mostly because being a good role model as an athlete involves doing your job well, and keeping your mouth shut. Chances are, if a child has an athlete for a role model, it is because they like that sport. In which case, they know of other players. So they would also know how many more athletes try to conduct themselves in a good manner, than the ones who go out and make a fool of themselves. And for that reason, I think athletes should be role models, because for every Plaxico Burress, who shot himself in the leg with his own gun while at a club last year, there are ten athletes like Tiger Woods.

For this project, I felt that using some pictures of the athletes that make good role models would benefit my argument. So often we see all the negative publicity of athletes, this was a way to show the good side of these professionals. It was important not to put too many words in the power point presentation because that would take away from the impact I wanted the pictures to make. The colors were very important as well. It would have been a bad idea to use bright, flashy colors because the audience to this argument would not be to adolescents, but rather adults. Overall, I think it was a very efficient way to advocate this topic, and I had fun doing it.