in Journalism and Mass Communication
By Lauren Rabaino on 10,000 Words, July 20 –
A new journalist reference guide on tools and applications that can be used for iPhone reporting has launched fromUC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Although the book is called a “mobile” reporting guide, it’s actually device-specific, focusing specifically on the iPhone. You can download the book to read as a PDF, or download it from the Apple iBook store.
Read the full post on 10,000 Words
By Kristal Brent Zook on CJR, July 16
Perhaps Liane Membis, the Wall Street Journal intern fired recently for inventing quotes, started out with noble intentions. As Miss Black America-Connecticut last year, she spoke against high illiteracy rates among African American children and of wanting to represent black women “in a positive light.” We’d assume that Membis, a Yale graduate, brought these ideals to her internship at one of the nation’s most prominent dailie
So what happened? How did her high ideals come crashing down so horribly? As odd as it may seem, she may not have thought she was doing anything so terribly wrong. As the director of the MA Journalism Program at Hofstra University on Long Island (and a former adjunct at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism), Membis’s transgressions probably should surprise me, but they don’t. Many students these days are amazed—I mean, truly baffled—when confronted with their own unethical behavior.
From RTDNA on July 10 –
The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey found that TV news staffing soared in 2011 – adding 1,131 jobs – to reach total full time employment of 27,653.
That’s a gain of 4.3% over last year and the highest average full time TV news staff ever. However, overall, it puts 2011 in second place for total TV news employment. First place is still held by year 2000. The average station newsroom employment then was lower than today, but more stations originated local news.
Photo credit: chrisinplymouth (Creative Commons)
By DYLAN BYERS on Politico, July 10 –
Americans’ confidence in television news has hit an all-time low, according to a new survey by Gallup.
Twenty-one percent of the 1,004 adults polled said they had “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in television news media, continuing a steady decline from the 46 percent who expressed confidence in television media in 1993.
Meanwhile, just 25 percent of those polled expressed confidence in newspapers, the second-lowest rating since 1973 and less than half of the 51-percent peak in 1979.
Read the full article on Politico
By DAVID CARR on The New York Times, July 8 –
While the rest of us were burning hot dogs on the grill last week, the newspaper industry seemed to be lighting itself on fire.
There have been cracks in publishing operations that are both hilarious and terrifying. The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa., published a box score for a baseball game that was never played, after one of the coaches made up a result to spare the other team the embarrassment of a forfeit.
The U-T, the daily newspaper of San Diego, published a two-week-old blog post — on its front page. And most notoriously, “This American Life” revealed that Journatic, a content farm owned in part by the Tribune Company that produces local articles on the cheap, was using fake bylines. Some of those hyperlocal pieces, which ran in newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle, were written in the Philippines.
Recent entries posted on or linked to the Poynter Institute website and AEJMC listservs on the long-running but heated debate on the value, proper structure, and best practices in journalism education have addressed some major issues: the status of professionals in journalism education, the gap between educators and journalists, the value of research, the importance of a doctorate in getting and keeping academic jobs. Some of the discussion conflates very different, albeit often intersecting, problems.
These arguments are becoming increasingly strident, with these different questions treated as if they are the same, partly because of crises over scarcity of resources—both economic and social. No one denies the sunami of technological changes facing journalism, as well as major upheaval in attitudes about news. Huge numbers of people assume (wrongly) that they don’t need news or don’t need professional journalists to produce it for them; they can use the same technologies to gather and disseminate their own news. News organizations are closing down, or squeak by with fewer people. Therefore, many more journalists—some highly experienced and award-winning, some with a few years of low- or mid-level experience—are seeking academic jobs.
Professionals regularly go straight from newsrooms both to academia, as they certainly deserve to. This includes deanships, arguably a more difficult transition, given the need for skills and talents not necessarily developed or tested in newsrooms. At my own university, professional journalists–from the full professors and “professors of the practice,” to the lecturers, who enjoy five year, renewable contracts — run the show. Indeed, lecturers are paid significantly more than assistant and associate professors, face no publish-or-perish, up-or-out crisis, so need not spend money, weekends and vacations, on research.
As historians of status conflict have shown, prestige and respect are finite resources in a zero-sum game: the gains of one group subtract from the prestige of others. As a result, battles over prestige and honor become most fraught precisely when those at the top begin to sense that they are losing ground. Precisely because professional journalists face this loss of credibility and authority, they are lashing out at journalism educators for not doing more to help what professionals call “the industry.” Yes, it’s also true that some universities anxious about their status require the Ph.D. These days, the economic crisis facing higher education probably goes further than this university-level dictate about Ph.D.s to explain why people don’t get jobs. New faculty positions cannot be created at will, and especially in a dismal economy (especially when jobs prospects look grim). AEJMC consistently tries to help departments make the argument to provosts about the value of professionals.
It’s worth adding that many Ph.D.-holding journalism researchers started out as journalists. This is ignored in complaints such as that of the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton about “the slow rate of change in journalism education, including how exceptional professionals (without advanced degrees) are being treated. You have not heard the last of this. Universities are likely to lose private-sector funding if it doesn’t stop.” He is correct that degrees are not more important than competence. But the Ph.D. should not be regarded as “disabling,” as if people who spend five or six years to earn a Ph.D. and launch a research trajectory suddenly forget everything they learned while in the newsroom, and become, as professionals suggest, uniformly unable to teach professional courses, serve as deans, apply accreditation standards–only able to write “unreadable articles for journals no one quotes, achieving nothing.”
Journalism education, including AEJMC, must do much more. As in every university domain, journalism faculty members teach what is most needed, but do research on a far broader spectrum; and we cannot dictate individuals’ research agendas. Collectively, however, journalism educators—not only in teaching, and service, but also in research—can and should do much more to help journalists figure out how best to carry their important role in these new and changing contexts. (In my experience, moreover, print-oriented professionals on faculties have been the most resistant to change, the most adamant about journalism’s unchanging values). Carrie Brown-Smith, one of the newer faculty members to respond to Howard Finberg’s recent essay, correctly noted that researchers can use blogs and social media to translate published research into versions more accessible and more relevant for working journalists.
So what is AEJMC doing to collaborate with professionals, in and out of the organization, toward our shared goals of promoting high quality journalism and encouraging support of journalism? True: we retain an admittedly old-fashioned name; in this sense, we have not met Mr. Newton’s call for “radical reform.” But divisions have changed names. “Online” has been added to the newspaper division. More to the point, we have programs to help faculty get back into the newsrooms to see what they know and do and as a way to see first-hand what makes their research more relevant; and to bring professionals to campus. One AEJMC task force is sponsoring workshops for minority journalists to help them understand what is necessary (or not) to move into academia, and thus to help insure that those moving into both part- and full-time teaching represent diversity. Another task force is specifically addressing the needs of Latino/a journalists. The AEJMC website features “Research You Can Use.” Our Council of Affiliates can always share these summaries of research relevant to news organizations with members. Indeed, this year the Council funded three research projects specifically helpful to professional journalism. They will be presented at our summer conference, and posted on our website.
Indeed, I invite you to attend the AEJMC conference in Chicago, marking our 100th anniversary, to see what we are doing. Richard Gingras, the head of Google News, will be the keynote speaker. You’ll learn about research, programs, and services that can help you.
Linda Steiner
President, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2011-2012
Email: lsteiner@jmail.umd.edu
By KEN DOCTOR on Nieman Journalism Lab, June 27 –
Are two Ruperts even better than one? We may soon find out, as News Corp.moves forward today to clone itself.
The cloning, or splitting, of the $34 billion company certainly has its logic. Hive off those pesky newspaper assets and the company’s book arm HarperCollins into a separate company. Then let the News Corp. entertainment conglomerate — satellite, cable, broadcast, movies, and more — focus on global opportunities as both the Internet and old-fashioned pipes offer seemingly unlimited upside for the distribution of entertainment content. (Fox News, best understood for its entertainment value, would go appropriately with the entertainment company, not the publishing one. That raises the question of whether those two operations, to be owned by separate companies, would continue to uneasily share prime Times Square office space. And who gets the News Corp. name? The company with the news or the company without it?)
Two-thirds of U.S. adults now use at least one mobile media device such as a smartphone or tablet, and they’re the kind of people marketers want to reach—they skew more educated and higher-income than people who don’t own those devices, according to a survey by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. And, happily for purveyors of print, they haven’t abandoned newspapers and newsmagazines in droves. For marketers looking at where to place their bets, smartphone and large media tablets (iPad) owners are more likely to be male while e-readers and small tablets skew female. People who own Apple and BlackBerry devices tend to be higher-educated and earn more than their Android-wielding counterparts.
By Howard Finberg on Poynter, June 15 –
“As we think about the changes whipping through the media industry, there is a nearby storm about to strike journalism education.
The future of journalism education will be a very different and difficult future, a future that is full of innovation and creative disruption. And, I believe, we will see an evolution and uncoupling between the value of a journalism education and a journalism degree.”
Read the full article on Poynter
By Liana B. Baker and Yinka Adegoke on Reuters, June 12 –
DirecTV Group (DTV.O), the largest U.S. satellite TV operator, could deploy technology that would enable its millions of subscribers to automatically skip television advertising, its top executive said on Monday.
Mike White, chief executive of DirecTV, said his company bought rights to the technology from a company called Replay TV nearly five years ago but has not seen any need to make it available to customers.
