Dr. Barbie Zelizer Wins 2011 AEJMC Tankard Book Award

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Dr. Barbie Zelizer was announced as the winner of the AEJMC Tankard Book Award at the 2011 AEJMC Conference in St. Louis. Dr. Zelizer is a Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, holds the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and is the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. Zelizer earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MA and BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The book is published by The Oxford University Press, which describes Zelizer’s book saying, “Tracking events as wide-ranging as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and 9/11, Barbie Zelizer demonstrates that modes of journalistic depiction and the power of the image are immense cultural forces that are still far from understood.”

An Austin Chronicle review of About to Die says, “[About to Die] is an audacious and often chilling examination of how visual media handle the moment of death, from engravings of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the Pacific tsunami of 2004. With an obvious and admitted debt to the academy’s favorite photography buff Susan Sontag, Zelizer treats these images as both rare and powerful.”

About the Tankard Book Award
The Standing Committee on Research administers the Tankard Book Award competition for AEJMC. Authors who are AEJMC members may self-nominate any first-edition scholarly monograph, edited collection, or textbook published the current year of call that is relevant to journalism and mass communication. Nominated books can be co-authored or co-edited, and must be well-written and break new ground.

About AEJMC
AEJMC is a nonprofit, educational association of some 3,700 journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals from across the globe. The Association’s mission is to advance education in journalism and mass communication to the end of achieving better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding. For more about AEJMC visit www.AEJMC.org.


 

For First Time in 9 Years, All Three Evening Newscasts Grow Viewership

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By Chris Ariens on TVNewser, Sept. 20, 2011 – The three network evening newscasts have been in a downward trend since the days of Tom BrokawPeter Jennings and Dan Rather. But for the first time since the 2001-02 season, all the three evening newscasts saw an increase in Total Viewers year-over-year.

Compared to the 2009-2010 season during the just completed 2010-11 season:

Read the full article on TVNewser

WSJ Places Content on Facebook, Hopes to Meet Readers There

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By Jeff Bercovici on Forbes, Sept. 19 – Is Facebook a friend of news companies, or is it a rival? No matter how much success publishers have piggybacking off its traffic, they can’t escape the cruel math: The more of their time consumers spend on Facebook and other social networking hubs, the less they have left over for news sites.

Now The Wall Street Journal has what it thinks is an answer to this problem. Called WSJ Social, it filters Journal content through the so-called social graph to yield a news product that lives entirely within the walls of Facebook. It launches Tuesday. Here’s what it looks like:

Photo Credit: Forbes

“The fundamental idea of it is super simple,” says Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network. “It’s about making [WSJ content] available where people are.”

Read the full article on Forbes

Associated Press Teams With 40 Newspapers On Mobile Coupons

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By  on Paid Content, Sept. 18 –  With newspapers having suffered through 20 straight quarters of decline — and no end in sight — a collaborative effort on the part of the Associated Press and 40 newspapers is designed to play on two of the industry’s last advertising strengths: digital and pre-print circulars.

The new mobile initiative, dubbed “iCircular,” will start rolling out on Monday within the mobile sites and apps of the 40 newspapers.

The iCircular feature will be found within newspaper mobile apps on the iPhone. The feature will be available on other formats, such as Google’s Android, later on. It’s HTM5-based, so that will also be available on newspapers’ web and mobile wap sites and ultimately ease iCircular’s transfer to other operating systems. The app will be situated within a special “Deals” section on each of the newspapers’ apps and mobile sites.

Read the full article on Paid Content

What media companies can learn from Walmart

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By  on Gigaom, Sept. 14, 2011 – As reported in a number of places, Walmart has acquired OneRiot: a startup that originally tried to do social search before pivoting to focus on social advertising. OneRiot joins a unit called Walmart Labs, which the giant retailer created earlier this year with the acquisition of a company called Kosmix. Why should media companies (or anyone else, for that matter) find this interesting? Because what drove Walmart to make these acquisitions and create Walmart Labs is the same thing that plenty of other companies, and particularly media entities, should be interested in: making sense of all the data coming in from users on social networks and their sharing activity.

Making sense of the social-network firehose
As Rajaraman told me when I interviewed him at the Disrupt conference last year, where Tweetbeat was launched (a video clip from our interview is embedded below): “It was like we were waiting for this real-time data flow to come along so we could apply our semantic filter to it.” An understanding of how to filter those billions of tweets using semantic tools and a “taxonomy” or structured view of online data allowed Tweetbeat to generate customized views of the content being posted to Twitter in real time. In one of its first offerings, Tweetbeat let users follow not just information about the World Cup, but tweets and links about individual players, teams and countries.

Obviously, that kind of real-time filtering and analysis of activity can be applied to far more than just showing which soccer team is the most popular, and Walmart’s purchase of Kosmix showed Walmart is clearly interested in the potential of using these techniques to understand its customers and its market. The addition of OneRiot adds an advertising-related aspect to Walmart’s approach, which could help the retailer understand more about what drives users to click or interact with ads and ad-related content on social networks.

 

Read the full article on Gigaom

Mother Jones: The Gutsiest Campus Newspapers of 2011

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By Karmah Elmusa on Mother Jones, Sept. 15, 2011 – Whether they were covering the Alabama tornadoes in depth, pissing off James Franco, or exposing undercover drug busts, these campus newspapers boldly broke the news.

Watch This Space: In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business prof who’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. Te paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.

Eye on the Storm: The University of Alabama’s Crimson White provided real-time coverage of last spring’s tornadoes, offering eyewitness accounts and a photo slideshow to highlight the destruction.

 

Read the full post on Mother Jones

 

Nieman Reports launches its fall issue online

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Nieman Reports has launched its Fall 2011 issue. This newsletter gives you links to our magazine’s sections through in the spotlight and to its articles in In This Issue. The website’s fellows & contributors highlight on-going work of journalists, and our links deliver you to other aspects of Nieman Reports’s outreach and endeavors. – Melissa Ludtke, Nieman Reports

View the Fall 2011 Issue

Flipboard CEO Says the Future of the Web Will Look More Like Print

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By Matthew Panzarino on TNW, Sept. 12, 2011 – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue is on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt conference right now and he is saying some interesting things about the future of the web and the iPad. “The web will feel a lot different in 5 years. It will feel a lot like print and be monetized differently than it is currently.” Update.

McCue also said, “I think that the iPad is a superior consumption device for content on the web. It is actually the perfect device for content on the web. We’re trying to create a new type of browsing experience that is right for the iPad.”

On The Daily and other products that offer media content directly on the iPad, McCue is optimistic. “I think that there will be an opportunity to create new kinds of content companies on the iPad.”

Read the full post on TNW

Study: Use of anonymous sources peaked in 1970s, dropped by 2008

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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:

  • Nowadays journalists almost always describe anonymous sources in some way rather than simply calling them “reliable sources.” In 1958, 34 percent of stories with unnamed sources used such vague language; that dropped to under 3 percent in 2008.
  • Reporters are doing a better job of explaining why they grant anonymity. In 2008, about a quarter of stories offered some explanation. While Duffy said that’s still low, through 1998 such explanations were provided in fewer than 10 percent of stories.
  • Journalists haven’t changed their practice of independently verifying all information from anonymous sources. They do so in most cases, but not all.

Study: LinkedIn top social media site for journalists

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By Kristin Piombino on ragan.com, Aug. 29, 2011 – When 92 percent of journalists have a LinkedIn account, there has to be a good reason. There is, and business leaders, representatives and PR pros should pay attention.

new survey from Arketi Group found that the percent of journalists on LinkedIn has increased from 85 percent in 2009. Why?

LinkedIn provides an easy way for reporters to connect with sources.

“It comes as no surprise more BtoB journalists are participating in social media sites, especially LinkedIn,” Mike Neumeier, principal of Arketi Group, says, “LinkedIn provides an online outlet for them to connect with industry sources, find story leads and build their professional networks.”

Read the full article | Download the report