Michael Bugeja, who directs the Greenlee School at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide (Oxford University Press, 2005), which won the Clifford Christians Award for research in media ethics, and Living Ethics across media platforms (Oxford, 2008), which calls for a moral convergence to accompany the technological one.
Bugeja’s research has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Futurist, The International Herald Tribune (France), Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada), The Guardian (UK) and The Economist, among others. His articles have appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, New Media and Society, and Journal of Mass Media Ethics, among others.
Bugeja also writes professionally for such publications as The Quill, Editor & Publisher and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Bugeja became director of the Greenlee School in 2003. Previously he was a journalism professor at Ohio University and a media adviser at Oklahoma State University. In the 1970s, he worked as state editor for United Press International and holds a Ph.D. from OSU and a master’s from South Dakota State University.
How do you define mass communication?
This is an excellent question because we cannot yet answer it sufficiently enough to create a business model for major news outlets struggling with Internet and converged platforms. In the past, the power of the technology–whether it was a 64-inch six-color sheet-fed press or a 50,000 watt radio station–was aligned proportionately with the target market mass audience. The rule was, the larger the investment, the greater the audience or the potential for the mass. Now, a high school blogger has the means to broadcast, telecast or publish worldwide through the laptop in her bedroom; so technology and investment no longer are reliable gauges of mass audience.
To be sure, the technology of old media was its chief expense, as in the purchase and storage of paper and ink, or the cost and maintenance of a printing press, or the equipping of a broadcast tower and studio (not to mention a fleet of delivery trucks or television vans and the upkeep and insurance on them). The sheer cost of such technology kept the news in aristocratic hands. The democratization of media, which continues to this day globally, has taken news out of those hands and placed it in the populace’s, giving the audience a google of outlets associated with lifestyle choices or psychographics.
The disconnect between the power of the technology and the size of the audience has generated this question–how do we define a mass, by its potential for or actual audience?–data that can fluctuate wildly from day to day, yet again undermining business models based on reader or viewer audits by which to establish advertising rates.
How do you keep your students excited about working in the field of communications in light of shrinking job opportunities?
Iowa State University can boast the best student newspaper in the country, at least for awhile still, as our Iowa State Daily was chosen last year by the Society of Professional Journalists. See: http://www.las.iastate.edu/newnews/dailyaward.shtml. We are fortunate to have topnotch journalism and advertising practitioners in Hamilton Hall where both the Daily and the Greenlee School are located. Students see us get excited by the news or creativity. They see us shoot pictures, do campaigns, file stories ourselves, challenge theories or create new ones in class, predict legal precedents or prophesy ethical dilemmas as case studies. Then, too, we have a steady stream of professionals–many from our alumni base–visiting us each month. We have about 10 student media and media organizations, including an ad agency and an integrated media suite, with 400-hour internships (and more) sponsored by the likes of Meredith Corporation or Scripps. We don’t focus on the shrinking job opportunities but on our core value of the First Amendment, and we use our nationally recognized First Amendment Day (sponsored by Lee Enterprises) as a recruiting tool.
And of course, I as director, rationalize all this when I think about job opportunities. I have a comrade in that in Mark Witherspoon, who advises the Daily, and is a Watergate-era reporter like me. We fill our students with as much zeal as possible before they leave for the real world, with its downholds and debt, knowing that even if many of the jobs disappear, our students will be taking to other industries these fundamental ideas that have endured (or are still being realized) since the founding of this country:
- Equality: Every person has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- Inclusivity: Our national identity is incorporated in our name, the United States.
- Work Ethic: Reason and merit prevail over bloodline and entitlement.
- Honesty: Truth supersedes authority.
- Access: Education ensures free speech in a republic.
- Tolerance: The majority may rule, but the minority must be heard.
- Accountability: Journalism is the watchdog of government.
What changes do journalism and mass communication programs need to make in order to stay relevant today?
Right now there are few, if any, successful business models for mass communication. It’s the nature of the platform. The convention of Internet is such that information that sells once has little value. In fact, we give it away for free. The Internet is programmed for revenue generation–the vending of information about information that sells more than once. This is a devastating coincidence for journalism and mass communication. In the end, it doesn’t matter how inviting or engaging your Web portal is if those who visit there don’t want to pay for anything. Then there are mistakes we should not have made in media. Over time, we violated our reason for being–which was to give the audience what it needed rather than what it wanted–and learned that so many other social networks and outlets could do that better than we could, from Facebook to TMZ.com.
The key to relevancy is understanding the nature of the platform. When we do, we will create a successful business model because each newsroom is a storehouse of information about information–we used to call that the morgue–databanks full of court records, sport stats, births, deaths, awards and so much more. We have to learn how to vend that information and sell it more than once. And when that happens, the nature of newsgathering, not the technology, will change. We will have created a successful business model. And in the trade-off, we no longer may be defenders of the Constitution but generators of the e-Conomy.
Then there is this: There will be those who want what we used to do and would be willing to pay for it, huge sums–a select few aristocrats who realize that timely news that informs rather than affirms was, is and will be the pathway to power. There is irony in that. In the past, the “mass” of communication was its power source. In the future, it may be the “communication” sans mass that shifts the paradigm.
If you could save one journalism and mass communication course from extinction, what would it be and why?
Journalism history. But there is no future in it.
What new media tools or applications do you incorporate in your teaching? Why these in particular?
I’m an editor and advisor for the journalism social network, NewsTrust.net. As such, I have been able to convey to students the need to build trust in the online audience. The need for trust building online occurred when I was doing rather than teaching journalism.
In my enterprise work for The Chronicle of Higher Education, on the virtual world Second Life, I ran into an age-old problem of old media. The first draft of my story had an opening paragraph noting that there were about 300,000-500,000 people in-world at any time, even though Linden Lab inflated users to 9 million in some promotions. In an early draft I included how some people register multiple avatars, for instance. Problem was, I had only 1850 words to make my case, and that paragraph had to go. So I did that old wire service trick, noting that Second Life “reportedly” had 9 million users. That saved about a hundred words, and I met my length target.
You can find that article here: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/09/2007091401c.htm
When the article appeared, the blogosphere erupted, claiming I didn’t even know that only 300,000-500,000 people were active users, and if I didn’t know that, then what did that say about the rest of the piece!
The moral was not lost on me. Those online do not have the trust in journalism that the traditional print audience did in large part because we have not earned it through the editor-reporter relationships (especially when editors are routinely downsized these days). So in my second SL enterprise piece, I included a link to my interviews. Here’s the URL: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/11/2007111201c.htm
Given such disclosure, the online audience seemed satisfied that my second article was balanced. Since then, I have gone even further in my reporting, putting my fact checks online to build trust. See: http://www.interpersonal-divide.org/newsreports.html.
If you could offer a piece of advice to both your fellow educators and media professionals in the field, what would it be?
Read Ellul and Heidegger about the philosophy of technology, especially its nature of changing everything it touches without itself being changed much at all. Reread Neil Postman whose work I continue in my scholarship. Understand the programming of a converged platform that is asynchronous, acultural and ephemeral. Spend less time promoting presentation and more time analyzing how venders of information about information make money on the Web, and adapt that to journalism. Study eBay, for instance, and adapt that to online classifieds. Or give classifieds away for free with a note to users that they are on their honor to donate a percentage of any sale to the upkeep of the site, such as we see with shareware sites. Don’t think out of the box; think within it, the computer screen, and scrutinize the thing critically.
What do you see for the future of journalism and mass communication both in general and in higher education?
I think the future is incredibly bright for education in journalism and mass communication, because every discipline communicates with our equipment and should have to learn our values, especially if mass communication continues to dwindle in social influence. We should be filling huge lecture halls with our principles classes (and keeping non-majors out of our skills classes until they become zealous enough to enroll in our programs).