“Mormons into Media,” a commentary and review digizine on current pop culture and media, has drawn followers and visitors after just three months of online publication. Daniel Stout, professor in international cultural studies, runs the site with his colleague, Quint Randle, professor at BYU in Provo.
“The MormonsintoMedia.com digizine is something my partner and I created as a project for ourselves because we both love going to movies and watching television,” said Stout. “We both love writing reviews: book reviews, movie reviews, and popular music. We enjoy that kind of writing, so that’s how the digizine got started.”
Stout said he uses his blog as an example for students to view what he teaches in his class called multi-platform journalism.
Stout and Randle have experienced growth on their site from 425 views and 266 visitors in the initial month to 645 views and 270 visitors, two months later. They have had visitors from 10 countries including Mexico, the Philippines and Mongolia.
For four days a week, Stout usually writes starting at 10 p.m. and goes until 2 in the morning. He said writing is entertaining, but he hesitated to use the word “addictive.”
Stout doesn’t just write reviews, he also adds an LDS perspective to his commentaries. “Truth is where you find it,” he said. “There really are more moral messages in a lot of movies, and music, that we don’t talk about. Much of popular culture is seen kind of dubiously from not only our church but also other churches.”
Stout continued, “We wanted it to be from the faith standpoint of an LDS member. We wanted to do these reviews in a way that they could possibly enhance thought and contemplation, even someone’s faith.”
One of Stout’s recent reviews is about a new movie titled “Joy.” According to Stout, “Joy” is a “gritty” film about “whether the protagonist will get to the surface for a lifesaving breath, or drown in an ocean of adversity,” in the school of hard knocks.
Stout described the story line as lead character Joy having a divorced, unemployed husband living in the basement, a divorced mother who does nothing other than watch soap operas, and a father dumped at her door step by his second wife. Jennifer Lawrence plays the role of Joy and struggles to make ends meet working as an airline ticket clerk enduring complaints all day, described Stout.
Stout posted in his blog, “Do the protagonists make it? …Yet whether Joy makes it big is no consequence; it’s what she becomes through the refiner’s fire that defines victory. It’s similar to Joseph Smith’s ‘rough stone rolling’ self-assessment. A powerful element of Richard Bushman’s biography of Smith is the realism of the prophet’s personal development.”
He continues, “American realism deviates from the instant gratification of rags-to-riches films by shifting the focus from the rewards,… to human development, or how an individual becomes something. How a person is different at the end of the struggle compared to the beginning.”
Stout said like in “Joy,” keeping the faith is an ongoing exhortation by leaders in General Conference since the economic crisis of 2008.