Quarterly Spring 2011 — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get

Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Ken Doctor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. 219 pp.

Ken Doctor is a “Leading Media Industry Analyst.” It says so right under his name on the cover of his new book, Newsonomics. A former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Doctor spent twenty-one years with Knight Ridder. Now, as an analyst for a company called Outsell, he has joined the cottage industry that proclaims the future of media for all who will pay to listen.

How does he foretell the future? Mostly, it seems, by reading blogs. Apparently that is where all the wisdom required to understand the future of the mass media can be found. What method do bloggers use? “We build on each other’s ideas,” explains Doctor, “engage in intellectual battles.”

Morning Miracle. Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life. Dave Kindred. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2010. 266 pp.

Dave Kindred’s book about his former employer fits a predictable story line: Heroic Journalists Strive for Greatness Despite Money-Grubbing Bosses. As a result, the book is fun to read, yet short on erudition.

To be fair, Kindred telegraphs his loyalties in his title. The book’s focus is on the print version (the “morning miracle”) of the Washington Post, which he sees as a “great newspaper” struggling to survive. He begins the book by admitting to being “a hopeless romantic about newspapers,” and ends it by interpreting an intemperate newsroom punch thrown by a crusty editor at an unsuspecting reporter as a morality tale of rage against the dark powers enveloping newspapers.

Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. 432 pp.

For many younger J&MCQ readers, books in their traditional form are fast becoming a feature of the past. You (and you know who you are) use your iPad or other reading device, and hardly ever set foot in bricks-and-mortar bookshops anymore. You are gazing at Internet and other screens for hours on end.

The older among us (your reviewer being one) still enjoy an old fashioned book—even a heavy, hardbound one. We’ve built considerable collections over the years, often going back to titles we need or appreciated when we first read them.

Media Bias? A Comparative Study of Time, Newsweek, the National Review, and the Progressive Coverage of Domestic Social Issues, 1975-2000. Tawnya J. Adkins Covert and Philo C. Wasburn. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 182 pp.

Sociologists Philo Wasburn (Purdue University) and Tawnya Covert (Western Illinois University) have selected four long-standing domestic issues about which opinion ranges between positions commonly thought of as “conservative” and “liberal”—crime, the environment, gender, and poverty. In this study, media coverage that tends towards either one of these positions constitutes “bias.” More specifically, bias is defined as “a consistent tendency to provide more support to one of the contending parties, policies, or points of view in a sustained conflict over a social issue.” The authors examine the extent to which coverage over time is “biased” in Time and Newsweek, which they hold to represent the “mainstream media,” and in two overtly partisan publications, The National Review and The Progressive.

Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing. Mark Briggs. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2009. 359 pp.

The Internet challenges journalists and journalism schools to keep abreast of technologies deployed to deliver the news. Feeding growing, voracious online news operations requires both traditional skills, plus the ability to deliver news quickly via smart phones, netbooks, and other devices using an assortment of software and online services.

Mark Briggs’ new book, Journalism Next, brings together the fragmented resources available all across the Web, neatly tying the technology to what journalists do: gathering and reporting the news.

[Read more...]

Book Review – Journalism in East Asia

Journalism in East Asia. Toh Lam Seng. Tokyo: Sairyu Sha, 2010. 292 pp.

JMCQ readers may not know that an American-owned Chinese newspaper is one of the three “Forefathers of Japanese Press” and also one of the recognized ancestors of the modern press in China. Toh Lam Seng, a guest professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University, brings us a sense of freshness and originality by pointing out those historical relevancies between journalism in East Asia and its U.S. counterpart.

Toh’s book, written in Japanese, starts with solid research on the Chinese and Foreign Gazette, a Chinese newspaper established by Daniel Jerome MacGowan in Ningpo, China, in 1854, and continued by Elias B. Inslee in 1858, both missionaries of the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The Gazette was translated into Japanese and edited by Bansyoshirabesyo, a Japanese institute for the study of Western learning. [Read more...]

Book Review – Heat and Light: Advice for the Next Generation of Journalists

Heat and Light: Advice for the Next Generation of Journalists. Mike Wallace and Beth Knobel. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2010. 276 pp.

When it comes to fame—and probably fortune as well—there are few twentieth-century journalists who have enjoyed greater success than Mike Wallace. His gripping 60 Minutes interviews with most of the major news figures of the age set a standard for television journalism that will likely never be surpassed. So when Wallace and his former CBS colleague Beth Knobel (now a faculty member at Fordham University) offer a how-to guide to doing journalism, notice must be paid.

The result, Heat and Light, is a journalism primer aimed at the next generation of high school journalists. The text provides a detailed account of what budding journalists can expect as they enter the world of journalism, from interviewing sources to applying news judgment, from journalistic ethics to the differing demands of broadcast and print. Not only does this book present tips for building a successful foundation for one’s journalistic career, but it also details where journalism might be headed in the future. [Read more...]

Book Review – The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain

The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain. Emma Hanna. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

For many Americans—at least those less than about 98 years old—World War I is barely a blip on the historical screen. The assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo ignited a devastating conflict that ravaged Europe from 1914 to 1918. But the United States didn’t enter the war until 1917, and emerged comparatively unscathed. It’s true that American troops suffered losses on the battlefield, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, and everyone risked succumbing to the deadly pandemic known as the Spanish Flu. But for most Americans, “The Great War” was primarily a prelude to the conflict that would really matter: World War II. [Read more...]

Book Review – Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. Alison Piepmeier. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 272 pp.

Although the study of feminist zine culture that blossomed in the 1990s might strike the casual reader as a snapshot of an underground phenomenon in a brief historical moment, Alison Piepmeier makes the point in Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism that so-called grrrl zines are, in fact, a bedrock of third-wave feminism. In this well-researched book about the preferred media of the riot grrrl culture, she makes a compelling case for us to view the publications produced by young women in this time period as an important marker in the long history of the feminist movement.

Piepmeier, an assistant professor and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston, constructs a history of grrrl zines and weaves a theoretical understanding of them through a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach that borrows from “participatory media to print culture studies to art theory” and uses oral history, critical content analysis of both zines and comments of the women who produced them. [Read more...]

Book Review – From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library

From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. Christian Vandendorpe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 208 pp.

Text is anything but static as the printed word threatens to flutter off the page. This particular moment in the life of the word is the focus of many a book, dissertation, article, and blog, and it gives us cause to look nostalgically and critically at where we’ve been and where we seem to be headed.

Christian Vandendorpe, a professor of lettres françaises at the University of Ottawa, takes on a very wide and deep subject: how transformations of text and our interaction with it, as the author puts it, “affect every aspect of civilization.” Combining elements of all the above-mentioned forms, he provides what is effectively a crash course in the history of reading. [Read more...]

Book Review – Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get

Book Review – Morning Miracle. Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life

Book Review – Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century

Book Review – Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing

Book Review – Journalism in East Asia

Book Review – Heat and Light: Advice for the Next Generation of Journalists

Book Review – The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain

Book Review – Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

Book Review – From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library