in Journalism and Mass Communication
Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror. Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. 249 pp.
The cover art of Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting and Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror might lead the reader to believe that the book will examine American pop culture for military influences. Instead, the book offers a subjective look into U.S. domestic and foreign policy and the motivation behind America’s wars. [Read more...]
Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Napoli, Philip M. (2011). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 240.
Philip M. Napoli provides a critical cultural examination of the evolution of the concept of audience, beginning with its twentieth-century definition by media theorists and media practitioners. Persons within media industries, academia, and the consumer have redefined the conceptualization of audience, given the onset of the Internet in the twenty-first century. Napoli’s ideas help to shed light on the conceptualization of “audience” for the future. Scholars of journalism, mass communication, and cultural studies (as well as business) will find useful information in Napoli’s book, which provides new entrees into understanding how socially constructed definitions of audience are changing. [Read more...]
The Media Economy. Albarran, Alan B. (2010). New York: Routledge. pp. 201.
With everyone looking for the business model that puts the economy back in media economy, books with that title raise great hope. The difficulty in writing a book about the media economy is that the ecosystem is so fluid that any attempt to describe it is in danger of becoming a history and not a model for the future. [Read more...]
The October 2011 issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) marks the tenth anniversary of Hardt and Negri’s groundbreaking book Empire (2000) with a special theme issue devoted to its impact on critical communication studies.
The issue, guest edited by Jack Z. Bratich of Rutgers University, contains 19 essays from internationally recognized academics in communication, cultural, and media studies.
The focus of this issue resonates with the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement, as Hardt and Negri’s books (especially Empire) are believed to have predicted and helped shape the current wave of radicalism.
A key essay, “Corruption and Empire: Notes on Wisconsin” by M.R. Greene-May, directly links the concept of “corruption” from Hardt and Negri’s works to street action and thus would be useful in understanding current social activism.
Examining the (eventually failed) class struggle in Wisconsin that began with Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting legislation earlier this year, Greene-May argues how framing the solution to the problem of union busting as an electoral solution (through the ballot box strategy of recall and referendums) threatens the possibility of compositional and autonomous politics in class struggle. By demonstrating how party politics can politically capture and exploit class composition, as in the case of Wisconsin, Greene-May asserts that events of class struggle should “create their own conditions of possibility unfolding in their own time” rather than being defined and controlled by “the terms of the debate” by others. This claim parallels Hardt and Negri’s argument of how a successful radical movement should be like a “swarm:” that despite being decentralized, spontaneous, and free-flowing, a radical movement can self-organize, self-regulate, and self-govern.
We encourage those who are interested in seeing how Hardt and Negri’s works connect to current events to check out our entire October 2011 special theme issue. The Greene-May essay abstract can be accessed at: http://jci.sagepub.com/content/early/recent. (Full text download is available to Sage Journals Online subscribers.)
Contacts: M. R. Greene-May (essay), North Carolina State University, mrmaygreene@gmail.com, Jack Z. Bratich (guest editor), Rutgers University, jbratich@rutgers.edu, Hye-Jin Lee (managing editor, JCI), University of Iowa, hye-jin-lee@uiowa.edu
While the use of anonymous online forums is growing among newspapers, a majority of reporters say the online comments do not promote civil thoughtful discussion, according to a recent study published in Newspaper Research Journal. Researcher Arthur Santana concluded that many reporters are troubled by the anonymous content and express dismay over their newspaper’s “providing a forum for anonymous discussion, where emotions run high and mudslinging is the norm.”
According to Santana, although most newspapers have online forums, almost half of reporters “never” respond to readers’ comments on their own stories. Some 41.7 percent of reporters in Santana’s research said that they have not changed their approach to reporting based on reader comments.
In fact, 23.1 percent of reporters adapted their reporting practices to include more sources, and 22.9 percent of reporters changed their practices to include more facts. Hence, the online forum has become a medium for feedback to journalists.
Citizen comments also “have spurred reporters to re-examine the newsworthiness of a topic and have also helped them think of new and different stories to tell while nudging them toward new and different ways to tell them,” according to Santana, a doctoral student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oregon.
The study was published in the summer 2011 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.
Contacts: Sandra H. Utt Cell: (901) 628-2553 e-mail: nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org or Elinor Kelley Grusin e-mail: egrusin@memphis.edu
At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Seth Meyers poked fun at the notion that bloggers take stories from traditional news media sources. He was giving the audience a mock rundown of the after-parties when he hit on something that research has confirmed.
Meyers joked, “The New York Times party used to be free, but tonight there’s a cover, so like everyone else I’ll probably just go to the Huffington Post party. And the Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first and just steal food and drinks and bring it from there.”
The truth in Meyers’ joke is that blogs do tend to use stories from other traditional media outlets, like The New York Times. And the newspaper used most, according to a study published recently in Newspaper Research Journal is The Washington Post.
Marcus Messner, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Bruce Garrison, a professor at the University of Miami, studied the relationship between political bloggers and elite traditional news media and found both bloggers and elite media rely on each other to some degree rather than on original reporting. While traditional news media are the dominant sources for bloggers, blogs compete with many other sources in shaping traditional news media agendas.
The top-ten rankings for most cited media by blogs in the findings included:
The findings are limited to the popular blogs used in the study. The liberal filter blogs were DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, Eschanton, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. The conservative filter blogs were Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Powerline, and Quarters.
The study was published in the summer 2011 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.
Contacts: Sandra H. Utt Cell: (901) 628-2553 e-mail: nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org or Elinor Kelley Grusin e-mail: egrusin@memphis.edu
Research from the Newspaper Research Journal suggests that big city local news is interesting to people hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
In fact, the Los Angeles-based Daily News website attracts readers far away than within Los Angeles.
For readers of the online version of the Daily News, the reader’s average distance from Los Angeles was 422.5 miles.
The research conducted by Hsiang Iris Chyi, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, included reader surveys at 28 local newspapers that suggest newspapers based in locales with larger populations, as well as those with higher print circulations, tend to have a more geographically dispersed online readership.
Local news stories from Los Angeles top the list, which included a Staten Island paper, in a geographic ranking of reach.
The top-10 list for geographic reach of newspapers’ websites included:
1. Los Angeles – DailyNews.com
2. Denver – DenverPost.com
3. Denver – RockyMountainNews.com
4. Pocatello – JournalNet.com
5. Waterloo – WCFCourier.com
6. St. Paul – TwinCities.com
7. Erie – GoErie.com
8. El Paso – ElPasoTimes.com
9. Whittier – WhittierDailyNews.com
10. Dubuque – THOnline.com
The study was published in the summer 2011 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.
Contacts: Sandra H. Utt Cell: (901) 628-2553 e-mail: nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org or Elinor Kelley Grusin e-mail: egrusin@memphis.edu
By Steve Myers on Poynter, Aug. 9, 2011 – Newspaper ombudsmen and media critics complain often about excessiveand unnecessary use of anonymous sources, and yet the press uses them less frequently now than in the so-called “golden age” of journalism.
The use of unnamed sources peaked in the 1970s in the wake of Watergate. By 2008 it had dropped to the same relative frequency as in 1958, according to a paper to be presented at AEJMC this week.
“Going into this, I really did think that I was going to find that anonymous sourcing was used more than in the past,” said Prof. Matt J. Duffy, a professor at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi who worked on the study with Prof. Ann E. Williams of Georgia State University.
The other key findings:
By Robert Niles from Online Journalism Review, Aug. 23 – Why should journalists care about the scientific method? I suggested in my post last week that journalism students should take a lab science class to learn about the scientific method. Here’s why I think that’s so important to journalists today.
The scientific method provides a standard procedure through which scientists gather, test and share information. Obviously, part of that should sound familiar because gathering and sharing information is what journalists do, too.
But there are substantial differences between the scientific method and journalism reporting. And while I believe that those differences did not affect journalism’s viability when newspapers had an information monopoly in their communities, our lack of standards for testing information is hurting us in today’s more competitive information market.
Before I go any further, let’s introduce the scientific method, for those readers who aren’t familiar with it. Here’s a good overview of the scientific method:
1. Find a topic or question worth exploring
2. Do some initial, background research to learn about your topic or question. Read what’s been written before.
3. Come up with a hypothesis. This is your best guess of what happened/is happening/will happen, based upon what you already know.
4. Test your hypothesis. You do this by collecting data, either through controlled experimentation or observation.
5. Look at and analyze your data.
6. Based on your analysis, either accept or reject your hypothesis.
7. Publish your information, including all relevant details on how you collected and analyzed your data.
The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released their 2010 News Coverage Index raw data. Their findings can be used by scholars for their research by visiting the PEJ website: http://www.journalism.org/by_the_numbers/datasets.
A press release from PEJ says:
The News Coverage Index (NCI)—The NCI captures and analyzes some 50 news outlets in real time to determine what is being covered and what is not in the U.S. news media. The NCI launched in January 2007 and has run continuously since. Weekly findings are released every Tuesday in a concise narrative that charts the top stories of the week, trajectory of the coverage and differences among media sectors. In all, the 2010 NCI sample includes 52 outlets, every Monday through Sunday. The key variables include source, story date, big story, broad story topic, placement, format, geographic focus, story word count, duration of broadcast story and lead newsmaker. The outlets studied come from print, network TV, cable, online, and radio. They include evening and morning network news, several hours of daytime and prime time cable news each day, newspapers from around the country, the top online news sites, and radio, including headlines, long form programs and talk.
To view the data, visit the PEJ website or learn more about it from the PEJ press release.
