in Journalism and Mass Communication
By Cyndi Stivers on CJR, May 8 –
“There’s nothing new under the sun.” Thus spake my high-school teacher, then nearing retirement, and if I remembered nothing else (besides his rampaging eyebrows and alarming amounts of nostril hair), I would not forget this. His point, at the time somewhat dispiriting, was that ideas are continually repackaged and re-presented.
By Mathew Ingram on Gigaom, Apr. 30 –
One of the big areas of focus for technology companies over the past year has been “big data” — in other words, the idea that there can be a lot of value in finding patterns in the massive quantities of user data and other information that a business generates. This has a corollary in journalism too: namely, the growing realization that there is a lot of value in finding patterns in news-related information.
By Robert Andrews on paidContent, May 1 –
The Financial Times is preparing to kill off its iPad and iPhone app for good, signalling its final conversion from executable-app to web-app publishing.
The news publisher launched a HTML5 web app and pulled its iOS app off iTunes Store in mid-2011 but left the iOS version usable by subscribers with it already installed.
Read the full post on paidContent
By Robert Andrews on paidContent, Apr. 26 –
Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies reject suggestions they are now news organisations.
But they nevertheless think they have the prescription for what news media must do next…
First, the disclosures: “We’re not a news company,” Google’s head of news products and Google+ programming Richard Gingras told media executives at the Paley Center’s international council of media executives in Madrid on Thursday. “We’re a platform,” Facebook’s journalism manager Vadim Lavrusik duly followed.
The East Carolina University controversy over the firing of a student advisor has been settled, so we’ve compiled a few articles that may be of interest to journalism and mass communication educators about the topic.
The FCC is set to vote tomorrow on whether or not TV stations will have to post political ad information online. To get the word out about this, Bill Moyers asked journalism professors and students to visit local television stations and gather information on political ad funding. Moyers recently posted on his site:
“Two intrepid journalism students from Kent State — Megan Closser and Shanice Dunning — took me up on my challenge to visit their local TV stations and uncover data behind the political ads they run. Naturally, they took their cameras, but faced a surprising amount of resistance to using them.”
You can view the request Moyers made on his show below. You can also view the video Kent State students made about their trip to four local television station here: http://billmoyers.com/2012/04/24/ohio-journalism-students-answer-call-to-uncover-political-ad-data/
By Katy Culver on Poynter, April 20 –
My students were recently on spring break, but that didn’t slow them in their march to improve my teaching through social media.
At one point, a student in my intro course tweeted:
He highlighted an ethics case I’d completely missed — NBC’s investigation of some clearly problematic editing of audio from the Trayvon Martin shooting.
At first I said, “Geez, how did I miss that?”
Then I thought, “Thank God for social media.”
We are conducting research on attitudes toward plagiarism, replicating, in part, a research survey that was conducted and paper that was published more than 25 years ago by assistant professor Jerry Chaney and associate professor Tom Duncan of Ball State University’s Department of Journalism. The article was published in Journalism Educator, Summer 1985, pp. 13-16.
Specifically, this survey will measure the change in attitudes toward plagiarism, if any, over the past 25 years. The survey is being sent to professors in the journalism field as well as to editors of daily and weekly newspapers in the United States and Canada.
The survey is completely anonymous. You will be identified only as a professor in the academic realm or an editor in the professional one. You can click on this link to take the survey, which will take about 5 to 10 minutes:
https://iup.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0dmFcje95yoI4Bu
If the link does not work, try one or both of the following:
1) Make sure there are no spaces at the end of the typed link; or
2) Copy and paste the link into your browser.
This study has been examined by Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects. Since the survey does not identify the participants except by broad category, the research has been determined not to fall under the purview of the Board.
If you would like a summary of the survey results when compiled, please send an email to David Loomis at doloomis@iup.edu, or to Pat Heilman at pheilman@iup.edu. Thank you for your participation.
David O. Loomis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Journalism, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Patricia I. Heilman, Ph.D., Professor of Journalism, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
By Matt Creamer on AdAge, April 16 –
That I live in a city (New York) where 54% of residents are car-free means chances are good that I don’t own a vehicle. The odds increase with my address in Manhattan, a borough where by some counts about 75% go without wheels, and positively soar in my parking spot-desolate ZIP code.
The author sees lots of TV ads for cars — in Manhattan.
So it’s a safe bet that all the auto ads dominating commercial pods I see nightly aren’t safe bets at all. Despite being nowhere near a sales funnel that might eventually deposit me behind the wheel, I am besieged by car and car-related pitches. I see Lincoln pitchman John Slattery more often than I see my friends, and the Jay-Z flourish announcing that Chrysler 300 spot loops endlessly in my mind. Don’t even get me started on Progressive ‘s Flo and the Geico Gecko.
By Katherine Bygrave Howe on Bloomberg, April 13 –
We remember the Titanic for its epic technological hubris. But the ship’s sinking also marks the moment when a more modest technology, the wireless radio, began to transform the shipping industry.
As an example of the Progressive-era faith in technology, the Titanic is hard to equal. In addition to its sumptuous interior, the ship was able to churn across the ocean at a staggering 22.5 knots. It was also outfitted with the most sophisticated wireless-telegraph technology available, with a range of nearly 1,000 miles.
While the speed was central to the ship’s operation, the wireless radio was considered a novelty.
Read the full article on Bloomberg
