Digital Media — AEJMC Hot Topics

Refocusing student media to align with digital first approach

May 30, 2012 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Aaron Chimbel on Online Journalism Review, May 29 –

We all know the way people get their news has been upended in the past two decades. If you wanted to get the day’s news a few years ago you had to get it when the news organizations said you could have it. That usually meant a few times a day on television and radio or when the newspaper was published.

By the time what we now call legacy media was able to present the news it was inherently old.

Times, of course, have changed. News organizations have to change, too.

Read the full post on OJR

Magazines’ Newsstand Slide Accelerates but Digital Circulation Shows Promise

February 8, 2012 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Nat Ives on AdAge, February 7 –

Magazines’ paid circulation continues to slip, victim of a persistent undertow at newsstands that seems to be regaining strength.

Magazines’ average paid and verified circulation in the second half of 2011 fell 1% from the half a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ latest roundup of publishers’ circulation reports.

Subscriptions increased 0.7%, but that wasn’t enough to overcome a 10% drop in single-copy sales, according to the audit bureau’s figures.

Newsstand sales fell 9.2% in the first half of 2011, by comparison, 7.3% in the second half of 2010 and 5.6% in the first half of 2010.”

View the full post on AdAge

Filed Under: Hot Topics Tagged With: adage, Digital Media, magazines

New Yorker Editor: Print Edition Will Still Be Here in 20 Years

February 1, 2012 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By: Jason Del Rey on AdAge, Jan 31, 2012 –

“New Yorker Editor David Remnick says his long-form publication continues to invest in web staff and digital-exclusive content. But he still sees the digital extensions as complementary to the core print product, not a replacement — at least not anytime soon.

Asked in an onstage interview at All Things D’s media conference whether he believes the New Yorker will still publish a print magazine 20 years from now, Mr. Remnick answered, ‘I do.’”

Read the full post on AdAge.

Filed Under: Hot Topics Tagged With: adage, Digital Media, magazines, New Yorker

Western Kentucky Univ. Students To Work on NEWS! World Summit

June 17, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

The student-run, full-service advertising and public relations agency at Western Kentucky University, Imagewest, is traveling to France this summer to work on client projects for the Global Editors Network (GEN) in Paris, France including the NEWS World Summit 2011 in Hong Kong.

From their press release:

Imagewest will be collaborating with GEN, a non-profit association of news editors-in-chief and senior news executives from around the world working to make a collaborative effort to preserve the quality of journalism while supporting the digital environment. GEN was established in March 2011 in an effort to break down the barriers between traditional and new platforms allowing editors-in-chief and seniors news executives working in print, digital, mobile or broadcast to gather and share information to define the future of journalism and create new editorial services.

For more information about Imagewest or their trip you can visit their website.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Digital Media, imagewest, wku

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.

Book Review – Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future

May 11, 2011 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

Reinventing Public Service Television for the Digital Future. Mary Debrett. Bristol, England: Intellect, 2010. 253 pp.

There has been considerable ink spent in recent years bemoaning the dour outlook of traditional public service television broadcasting in the face of growing competition from digital commercial services. Mary Debrett, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, takes a different tack to that competition by examining in some detail the ongoing story of six major public service broadcasters in four countries.

Chapters deal with Britain (the BBC, of course, but also Channel Four), Australia (ABC as the national broadcaster, and SBC, the Special Broadcasting Service, which centers on indigenous people), the United States (the Public Broadcasting Service), and New Zealand (Television New Zealand). Such a choice is obviously quite narrow—all these countries speak (largely) English and are industrial democracies. Inclusion of such developing regional powers as Brazil, India, or perhaps South Africa might have produced more generalizable results.

Digital editions could give magazine industry a billion-dollar boost

August 17, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

ATD, Peter Kafka | [...] That’s the conclusion of a new study sponsored by Next Issue Media, the “Hulu for Magazines” consortium that’s supposed to figure out the industry’s future.

It says iPad magazines and similar stuff will generate $3 billion in advertising and circulation revenue in 2014, assuming that the market expands beyond Apple (AAPL) to include Google (GOOG) and other competitors. But after you account for print dollars the digital versions will cannibalize, that nets out to $1.3 billion in incremental revenue. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Apple, Digital Media, Future of..., Google, iPad, Journalism, Magazine

Transformations: Stories from the Digital Front Lines

August 3, 2010 By Brad King Leave a Comment

There’s much debate about the future of journalism these days, much of which I find uninteresting. Too often ideas and analysis flow great distances from the front lines. This, of course, is my bias: I’m rarely interested in the thoughts and ideas of those who haven’t rolled up their sleeves and done the dirty work to transform the world from one of atoms to one of bits.

That transformation is more subtle than simply a transition from static paper to interactive digital “page.” The implications are profound as we begin to understand the nature of network communication, linked information systems, open architectures and social inter-connectivity. Even the most basic idea of budget meetings, where editors and reporters “decide” what the news will be, should be overhauled and re-imagined in this network world. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Brad King, Digital Media, Journalism, New Media, online

Why Digital Rights Management Won’t Save the News

March 6, 2010 By AEJMC Leave a Comment

By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

Within the last year, large and small newspaper organizations have moved previously free content behind subscription walls that require readers to pay for access. The new model is fraught with peril, mostly notably the drop in online circulation as content becomes inaccessible through traditional search.

More concerning, though, may be the Associated Press’ decision to create a News Registry, which is a fancy name for a digital rights management (DRM) wrapper around its stories, which would allow content publishers the ability to determine how, when and where those stories — or parts of those stories — are replicated across the Web.

Which seems like a noble cause.

There is just one problem: DRM wrappers have, by and large, failed in the digital age because they create an “ease-of-use” problem for consumers. In order to work, DRM restricts different activities. It may, for example, prevent you from playing a CD on certain types of computers. Which is fine if you are technologically savvy enough to figure out which devices. Most people aren’t. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Amazon, Amazon's Kindle, Apple, Brad King, Copyright, Creative Commons, Cyberspace, Digital Culture, Digital Media, Digital Rights Management, File-Sharing, Internet, iPod, iTunes, Lawrence Lessig, Media Law, Media Piracy, New Media, News Registry, Newspaper, Recording Industry, Tech Meme, Web