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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On the Challenges of Small Newsrooms and Mobile Communication

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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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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Technology, Text and Talk

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Jim Benjamin, Director of the Graduate Studies in Communication, University of Toledo

The recent explosion of interest in social networking technology brings to light new dimensions of the spoken vs. written communication debate that occasionally emerges. Twitter uses written text, Facebook uses text and graphic images, “chat rooms” in on-line courses use text, and the “old” technologies of books and e-mails use written communication. Lecture captures, teleconferences, radio, television, and the “old” technologies of lectures, conversations, discussions, and telephones use oral communication.

The debate is ancient. Plato’s Phaedrus argued that the discovery of writing “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

We know, of course, that speaking and writing are not mutually exclusive, that the existence of one does not preclude the existence of the other. You can as easily write the words for a speech as you can speak the written words aloud. We also know that the arts of writing and speaking are both valuable skills communicators must develop. As a journalism educator you need to write out your lesson plans and instructions for activities and scripts for programs, but as a journalism educator you must also speak in class, talk with your students individually, and transform the script into an oral performance. [Read more...]

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Book Review: The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. J.P. Telotte. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 232 pp. $60 hbk. $20 pbk.

Spend a day at any Disney theme park, and you can’t help but be dazzled by technology. Life-like singing birds, carousing pirates, and even pontificating presidents are a regular part of the Disney park experience. In fact, innovative technology has been a hallmark of the company since Walt Disney began filming his early cartoons in the 1920s.

The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology by J.P. Telotte pays tribute to Disney’s technological savvy. The book offers readers an overview of how the man and his company have used cutting-edge technological tricks over the years to enhance a variety of media products. [Read more...]

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Discussing JMC with… Charles Davis

June 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Charles DavisCharles N. Davis is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and the executive director for the National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), headquartered at the School.

Davis’ scholarly research focuses on access to governmental information and media law. He has published in law reviews and scholarly journals on issues ranging from federal and state freedom of information laws to libel law, privacy and broadcast regulation. He has earned a Sunshine Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his work in furthering freedom of information and the University of Missouri-Columbia Provost’s Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching, as well as the Faculty-Alumni Award. In 2009, Davis was named the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Teacher of the Year.

Davis has been a primary investigator for a research grant from the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation for NFOIC and another from the Rockefeller Family Fund for the study of homeland security and freedom of information issues. He was a co-investigator for an award from the U.S. Department of State for a curriculum reform project for Moscow State University in Russia.

Davis worked for newspapers and as a national correspondent for Lafferty Publications, a Dublin-based news wire service for financial publications, Davis reported on banking, e-commerce and regulatory issues for seven years before leaving full-time journalism in 1993.

How do you define mass communication?

Hmmm…..I wonder whether the question is whether the very nature of mass communication is changing in real time, with emphasis on the “mass.” Blogs, listservs, Twitter feeds – all can achieve what a decade ago required mass distribution. What that does to the relationship between the audience and the content mean these days, and how it works with and without interpersonal media – those are real questions worth pursuing. [Read more...]

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Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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by Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

When Britannia opened for business in July 1997, there was a land run. Of 100,000 people. Within days, the new homesteaders had snatched plots of land, set up businesses and built homes. In other words, they created a community. They had taken ownership.

Not that it was all roses. There were problems. There was no infrastructure available. No way to address wrongs. Britannia was a jumbled mass of human chaos.

This place was the epicenter of the first commercially success massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). This “persistent world”, which existed whether or not players were logged into the game, changed the way we viewed online communities. Suddenly, the worlds that had existed simply in text formats (e.g. The Well, CompuServe, QuantumLink) became graphical. [Read more...]

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Misdiagnosed: Why Newspapers will Build Bad Business Models

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Rupert Murdoch raised quite a stir in the publishing world when he announced last month that he would, in the near future, remove his company’s news content from Google. His reasoning: Google is stealing, making money off headlines, decks and images, which ultimately hurts his bottom line since people aren’t viewing that content on his company’s sites.

In December, the news industry fired another salvo when Murdoch’s News Corp. and four other media conglomerates announced the formation of a joint venture to develop a digital publishing platform for the Web and the emerging e-Reader market. This followed the Hearst Corp., one of the companies involved in Murdoch’s conglomerate, attempting to push its Skiff e-Reader software to e-Reader devices in 2010.

That Google — and the rest of the technology world — didn’t blink any of these ideas is telling. Google, in fact, quickly unveiled an easy solution that would allow any publisher to remove its content immediately from search. So far, none have. [Read more...]

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