By Tom Hutchison, Ph.D.
Middle Tennessee State University
The Bacon’s MediaSource is located on the two computers at the back of the computer lab in the Mass Comm building. This program is designed to help you build media lists and contact information. The program is updated quarterly.
Open the Bacon’s program with the icon on the desktop. Once the program opens, it will look like this.
Go up to the search tab at the top. Then select Powersearch. After you do that, the screen will look like this. Select the media type from the tabs (radio, TV…)
Once you have selected your media type, you can begin to set the parameters of your search. Below, we are in Daily Newspapers and have selected “area by Geographic range.”
Next we want to select the particular markets and move them over to the right hand column, as illustrated below.
From the DMA window, we have selected Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston and moved them over to the right side using the blue arrow buttons.
When we are finished selecting our markets, we move ahead to what types of information we want to gather on the media in those markets.
We want editors because we want to pitch our story to an entertainment or music editor. After selecting editors, we get another window below that from which we can select the type of editors we want.
We will now select music editors, and just in case they don’t have one at that paper, we will also pick entertainment/arts editors. Don’t forget to move them over to the right side using the blue arrow button.
Now that we have selected all our criteria for the search, go back up to the menu bar, select search and then build list. This process will take a while and as this occurs, various boxes will open in the upper right corner of the screen to update you on the progress of the search. When it finishes, it will give you a table like below.
We are not finished yet because we want to customize the table for our needs. By default, there are certain selected fields at the top of the media list, center white box. We may want to add some additional fields from the available fields box. We may also want do deselect some of the fields at the bottom. You move them back and forth using the blue arrow keys. You may want to add in the fields of fax number, email address, street address, city, state, and zip.
Then you must click on update display to implement your changes. Then our list will look like below.
You can then investigate further by clicking on the media name. We’ll select Houston Chronicle.
Now we have a new window with specific information on this newspaper, including contact information for each editor.
But getting back to our media list, we may want to print this out. However, there are no printers at these computer stations so you must export the file (the media list) and then import it into excel at another computer. First, close out the daily newspaper window.
Then from the file menu, click on export, then as displayed. This will save your file.
When the export window comes up, click on the little box with the three dots, to the right of the “save as:” white box. This will let you specify where to save the file (on you’re a: drive disk).
Now to open the file in excel. Use the open feature and then find the file. When you click to open, this should open the text import wizard.
Select delimited from the radio box under “chose the file type…”. Then click next to move to step 2.
Then under step 2, in the delimiters area, click on the comma box.
Now the columns are beginning to take shape. Click on next for step three. The default settings in step three should work, so click finish. This should open the spreadsheet. You may have to adjust the column width for some columns. But you can now print out the spreadsheet from excel or manipulate the data further.