digital age — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – Skyful of Lies and Black Swans

May 17, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

Skyful of Lies and Black Swans: The New Tyranny of Shifting Information Power in Crises. Nik Gowing. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2009. 84 pp. £13 pbk. Free download from http:// reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/ publications/risj.html.

Nik Gowing’s career as a media professional, pundit, and scholar gives his insights into how news works considerable credibility. In this 2009 paper for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the longtime BBC commentator wonders and wanders through new media’s impact on public policy, and ponders “the new fragility and brittleness” of social institutions. Are government, military, and corporate bosses powerless or ineffectual when what Gowing calls “fast proliferating and almost ubiquitous breed of ‘information doers’” can set and frame the debate before the institutions of power can in gear?

Book Review – Remote Relationships in a Small World

May 17, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

Remote Relationships in a Small World. Samantha Holland, ed. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008. 296 pp.

One need only read collections of historic written correspondence (such as the letters exchanged between Abigail and John Adams around the time of the American Revolution) to realize that the phenomenon of “remote relationships” is by no means a product of the Internet age, or even the Industrial Age. Until the advent of relatively rapid transit in the twentieth century, many people around the world established and maintained relationships via letters (pen pals, letters from home, love letters, care packages, etc.) and, later, electronic communication such as the telephone, two-way radio, and even recorded messages on tape or video mailed to others. But there is no question that the Internet has dramatically expanded and enhanced remote relationships in the twenty-first century, and the advent of online virtual communities and social networking sites has made remote relationships nearly ubiquitous in the lives of many. And that is why Remote Relationships in a Small World offers a good starting point for scholars wanting to conduct research into online relationships.

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Filed Under: Quarterly Winter 2010, Reviews Tagged With: aejmc quarterly, culture, digital age, relationships, Samantha Holland

Book Review – The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age

May 16, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 319 pp.

It was in 2006 when a New York Times Magazine piece suggested that the hyperlink may be one of the most important inventions of the past fifty years. Yes, that humble little link that helps people move around the Internet at lightning speed was just as important as the Internet itself. Maybe even more important. After all, what good would the Internet be if people could not move around it? If people had to put in computer codes every time they wanted to go somewhere, the whole thing would slow to a crawl. In fact, links are such an important part of the Internet that most people would scarcely recognize that a link is something different from the Internet.

Book Review – Funding Journalism in the Digital Age

May 16, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

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

The traditional business model for daily newspapers is “virtually obsolete,” observe Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn from their Anglophile perches, which begs the question of how much longer print journalism can survive.

The 2007-2009 recession brought the first-ever three-year drop in U.S. advertising revenues, leading to the closure of venerable dailies including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A paid model for online content has proved the elusive Holy Grail of journalism in the digital age, leading to proposals of a number of alternatives to the for-profit model. Funding Journalism in the Digital Age provides both a guide to how the news media got into this mess and a handy compendium of the recent proposals to resuscitate journalism.

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

May 11, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

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.

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

May 11, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

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.