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 – Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age

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

This book addresses an emerging issue in scholarship with some solid research by the authors, not speculation. Bugeja is director and Dimitrova a faculty member in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University.

The issue is what happens to citations of online sources in journal articles. The title suggests many disappear. The authors address the question in two ways. They checked all the online sources mentioned in ten communication journals between 2000 and 2003. They also interviewed the editors of these journals about the question of vanishing cited sources. They asked about how often editors thought online sources were cited, how important they thought they were, and how much of a problem they thought vanishing sources were.

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