Bringing back the written word: 24 hours on the iPad

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Robert Gutsche Jr. and David Schwartz

It seemed impossible.

How could we go 24 hours without touching our laptops? Could we use our smart phones only for making and answering calls? Could we really live off of an iPad for all we do?

Those were the goals, anyway – to see how much we could do over 24 hours without any other device. Just the iPad.

So, for two days last week, the two of us, both journalism educators, avid news-users and news men, attempted to use Apple’s iPad for all of our electronic communications needs.

It worked – kind of.

These, then, are the major points from our iPad experience, and our thoughts on what it could do for journalism and journalism education. [Read more...]

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Osmosis, Active Pursuits, and the Role of Guidance in the Graduate Experience

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By Jennette Lovejoy, Ohio University

Similar to Breed’s (1955) description of how newsroom socialization happens by “osmosis,” graduate students also learn by keenly listening and watching the habits, routines, and accepted norms of the faculty and administration at their respective institutions. Open faculty meetings, job talks, interactions at the copier, advising, and co-authoring research papers are a few ways we are molded and shaped into academicians. At conferences, we give paper presentations side-by-side tenured faculty and our peers. We receive feedback on teaching evaluations as if we were faculty. When submitting a manuscript, we receive the same peer review as if we were all endowed chairs. We hope.

There is value in this equality; it allows us to know and experience the world of academia as a student with the clear reality of what it may be like in a faculty position, if we watch and take the time to listen and work with faculty who are willing to share their time, insights, and expertise with us. So much of navigating class schedules, teaching loads, research agendas, and leadership involvement is being able to watch someone else do it, ask questions, and learn through the process so that there are not disillusions or unrealistic expectations. [Read more...]

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The Challenge We Face Today

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By Elliot King, Loyola University Maryland

History • Among the widespread upheaval underway in journalism is a redefinition of the role of the academy in journalism education. Outright scorn for the study of journalism in college and universities has long been one of the odd and rather remarkable features of the journalism profession. It is hard to think of any other professional occupation in which it practitioners denigrated what students could learn if they studied a field as their undergraduate majors. Students interested in journalism were urged by professionals to study something else. The journalism was best learned on the job, the argument went.

Well, those days are over. Nobody pretends that any organization has the time or resources to teach entry-level journalists the tools of the trade. In fact, the opposite is true. The most common entry-level position in broadcast news is that of a backpack journalist, somebody who can report, use the camera, and edit the package. These are skills learned in journalism school these days, not in the field. In fact, for the first time, I have heard several job seekers report that people in the field are telling them to get masters degrees in journalism and master’s degrees give people a big advantage in the job search. [Read more...]

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Media Careers in Changing Times

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By Tony DeMars, Texas A&M University-Commerce

The mission of the AEJMC Internships and Careers Interest Group is to research and discuss how JMC educators can help college students get into media and media-related careers after graduation. In tough economic times, this may be even more problematic than usual. Even worse, as we struggle through a tough economy, we also struggle with what mass media has become and will become.

How are media companies and job options changing? We all know legacy media are undergoing significant changes. Newspapers continue to struggle, in part because of how citizens access news and in part because of a loss of traditional revenue sources. Local market TV stations are likewise finding competition and technology issues eroding their audience. A recent college graduate’s experience is one good example of today’s realities. This student completed a degree in broadcast journalism about three years ago and was hired into a reporting position in a medium/small market, then moved within just over a year to a medium market, then to a Top 10 market. This upward movement within such a short period of time represents how much faster good TV news talent can move up today. She now sees an even more drastic reality, reporting that her station has laid off several good people in recent months. Further, while she has never had to one-man band herself, the last three reporters hired at her station are all one man band reporters—making one-third of her salary—and are much younger. The newest hire had just recently graduated from college. Again, this is in a Top 10 TV market. [Read more...]

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Revving Up Mobile Delivery of Information

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There's an app for that.By Lori Blachford, Drake University

Magazine • I have a bad case of the apps. Symptoms: shrinking wallet, trance-like episodes, thumb cramps. I’m not alone. Apple reports that iPhone and iPod Touch owners have downloaded more than 3 billion applications since the App Store launched July 2008.

And it’s not just Apple (although, iLovers by far rule the category with more than 100,000 options); apps are a growing business for all mobile devices. The Motorola Droid phone, which was introduced in November, already has surpassed 10,000 apps and is growing fast. Intel is working on apps for its netbooks.

There’s something for everyone. Apps can be fun (Lightsaber Unleashed; when you need the Force with you), practical (iHandy Level; no more crooked shelves), informative (DunkinDonutz Locator; name says it all), educational (NASA; great photos), and downright silly (iDragPaper; try to pull toilet paper off the roll in record time). [Read more...]

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Paradigm Shifting in Journalism: When Readers and Community Participation Strengthen Media Companies

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by Manuel Chavez, Ph.D., Michigan State University
and Amy Schmitz Weiss, Ph.D., San Diego State University

The Elusive Challenge of Infusing Public Input in the News Process

It is no surprise to see how media companies in the United States are solving their economic problems, especially as related to the print industry: layoffs, hiring freezing, page reduction, international bureaus closings, and ultimately draconian newsroom reductions. The crisis has been more severe here than in other parts of the world mainly because of a voracious economic model that relied heavily in captive traditional advertising. And yes, as one travels to countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia is startling to see the vitality, size, and variation of newspapers and weekly magazines, simply put: newsstands and traditional press kiosks are alive and well.

There is one international example that shows a successful form of news production with public input that stands out in these challenging times. It is surprising if not paradoxical that a news organization in Mexico for almost twenty years has practiced the inclusion of the public (readers and community members) into the process of creating more attractive and relevant news products from print to websites. [Read more...]

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On the Challenges of Small Newsrooms and Mobile Communication

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by Doug Fisher, University of South Carolina

Small, family-owned news organizations may have the best opportunity to take advantage of the digital pathway to reach their communities, but they also may be the most endangered by it and find it the most challenging.

I’ve come to that conclusion after working last summer in the newsroom of an 18,000-circulation community daily newspaper and after years of working with other editors and publishers at individual papers or small family-owned chains.

The health of these newsrooms is important to their communities. In many instances, as case studies at the Newspapers and Community-Building symposia have shown, they are among the few institutions willing and able to stand up to the power structure. Also, as has been widely noted, they generally are suffering less economically than their big-city counterparts. [Read more...]

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The Future of Communication: Theory and Methodology?

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By Dietram A. Scheufele, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Communication as a discipline has come to a crossroads. The “mass” in mass communication has morphed into different publics that generate, exchange, and use content in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. And these changes in how content is produced and communicated are paralleled by much more far-reaching shifts in how some cohorts in society interpret traditional notions of privacy, objectivity, and source credibility. And so far, our discipline has not done a very good job at offering answers to what have become increasingly pressing questions in various societal debates. How do social media change how we interact with one another? How does information get disseminated in a fragmented multi-channel media environment? And what does the future of (mass) communication look like?

The tricky part, of course, is that many of the answers to these questions transcend the boundaries of our discipline. This is particularly challenging for a young field, such as communication, that continues to struggle with its identity and its desire to compete on an even playing field with much larger disciplines, such as psychology and political science. And if we are not careful, we may follow these disciplines down some dead ends. A good example is the debate surrounding Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s proposal in October 2009 to prohibit the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.” Coburn, of course, used the label “political science” but targeted social science much more broadly. And his comments rekindled an old debate among political scientists about incremental disciplinary research versus big questions. Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein summarized this intra-disciplinary dilemma best: “Graduate students discussing their field … often speak in terms of ‘an interesting puzzle,’ a small intellectual conundrum… that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” [Read more...]

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The Popularity of Twitter Among Celebrities: Tweets or Trouble?

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Tweet!By Cynthia Nichols, Oklahoma State University & Charles W. Meadows, The University of Alabama

From Taylor Swift, to former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, Twitter is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing social media networks among celebrities. Although social media outlets such as Myspace, and Facebook have been around for years, Twitter has only recently emerged into mainstream popularity, and everyone—from grandmothers, to fashion designers, to scholars, to celebrities—is jumping on board. Since its start in 2006, Twitter has grown rapidly to become the most popular micro-blogging Web site online. In fact, according to Nielsen, it grew a staggering 1,382% from February 2008 to February 2009, and has more than 7 million unique visitors every month [1]. However, this rapid growth leaves many people wondering: “What is Twitter?” and “Why should I use it?”

To clarify, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to send short text messages, otherwise known as “tweets,” to their Twitter page. Although there is a dizzying array of multiple-platforms available to support the service (mobile phones, computers, etc.), the restrictive 140-character length of the tweet minimizes the hassle and involvement for users. The simplicity of Twitter—which is one of its greatest strengths—keeps friends, families, and colleagues up-to-date on “What’s happening?” In essence, Twitter allows you to send a text message to the world. [Read more...]

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Moving to a Critical Future Without Moving Backward and Other Lessons from the Rear-View Mirror

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By Ralph Beliveau, University of Oklahoma
Bob Trumpbour, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona

In an article written over four decades ago, Jake Highton teased out the tensions between the “green eyeshades” and the “chi-squares.” Highton wrote about the differences between individuals with practical experience in the field and those who plied their academic craft with the statistical tools that were, and still are, embedded in the social sciences. Individuals such as Philip Meyer did much to connect social science with journalistic practices, yet the challenges faced in today’s complex landscape are unlikely to be resolved by the infusion of a single set of core practices into the media landscape. And what had been missing in these pictures of the arena of journalism education was recognition of critical approaches to the media that stretched back at least to the discussions of Lippmann and Dewey in the 1920s.

Despite a continuing line of critique from Lippmann and Dewey through the Chicago School, and the early years of critical theory, when a “green eyeshades and chi-squares revisited” article was presented at AEJMC in 1992 by Dickson and Sellmeyer, this critical line was ignored. The 1992 piece stated that “press criticism” was one way that scholars and theorists could offer “an area of research that (was) ultimately practical for newspapers.” So the debate between the “green eyeshades” and the “chi squares” and those assessing it suffered from a tunnel vision that left critical and cultural scholars on the sidelines. For some in the field, that omission may have been a desirable outcome. However, in a rapidly fragmenting and transforming media world, cultural and critical studies are more important than ever to better understanding the past, the present, and the future of our media environment. [Read more...]

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