Book Review[s] – Funding Journalism in the Digital Age & Vanishing Act

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Funding Journalism in the Digital Age:  Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn (2010).  New York: Peter Lang. pp. 185.

Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova (2010). Duluth, MN: Litwin Books. pp. 86.

In a dazzlingly short time, our communication and research habits have dramatically changed. Thanks to technology and the Internet, we’ve found new ways to share, store, connect, search, and inform. In so doing, we’ve damaged, outgrown, or abandoned systems that supported  “old” ways—as is plainly seen in the news industry’s turmoil of the past decade. Some functions those old ways served, however, need protecting. These books address two such challenges. The difficulty of finding new economic underpinnings for the production of journalism has been the focus of heated    attention. The need to be able to consistently retrieve what has been shared online has not. Both areas deserve explication, which the books’ authors ably provide.

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Book Review – Journalism Education in Countries with Limited Media Freedom

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Journalism Education in Countries with Limited Media Freedom. Josephi Beate (ed.) (2010). New York: Peter Lang. pp. 280.

Journalism education programs have enjoyed a dramatic expansion globally since the 1990s. As of 2007, there were 1,859 journalism education institutions across the world, according to the World Journalism Education Census (Center for International Media Assistance, http://www.ellenhume.com/articles/education.pdf). Against this background, the edited volume Journalism Education in Countries with Limited Media Freedom offers a better understanding of the meanings and implications of the growth of journalism education in non-Western societies. It stands out among numerous books on journalism education by taking a comparative perspective, not in conflict with a global view, and focuses on the development and current status of journalism education in transitional societies over the past few decades.

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