Editor’s Weblog, Stephanie Chernow | The coffee shop is working with Yahoo Inc. to create the new website design which consists of six free channels: news, entertainment, wellness, business, career, and my neighborhood, Starbucks. The my neighborhood category is composed of hyper-local news which is based on the location of the specific Starbucks. [Read more...]
The case for getting rid of tenure.
August 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Slate, Christopher Beam | The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The numbers for 2009, soon to be released by the Department of Education, are expected to dip even lower. [Read more...]
Digital editions could give magazine industry a billion-dollar boost
August 17, 2010 By 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...]
NYT: In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger
July 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Jeremy Peters | [...] Such is the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way.
Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding — or shaming — writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms. The Christian Science Monitor now sends a daily e-mail message to its staff that lists the number of page views for each article on the paper’s Web site that day. [Read more...]
Meeting coverage changes with newsroom cutbacks
July 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Reporters are using Internet tools, such as blogs and social media sites, to aid in coverage of public meeting as staff cuts in newsrooms across the nation mean fewer meetings are covered, a recent study published in Newspaper Research Journal reports.
In-depth interviews of 19 reporters from newspapers across the Southeast facing newsroom cutbacks found that reporters often use social media and blogging tools to report extra information, often procedural and content-related, while the final article in print focused on meeting outcomes. The researchers also found reporters use the Internet to avoid attending public meetings by doing things such as e-reading meeting minutes. [Read more...]
The Future of Communication: Theory and Methodology?
July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Dietram A. Scheufele, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Communication as a discipline has come to a crossroads. The “mass” in mass communication has morphed into different publics that generate, exchange, and use content in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. And these changes in how content is produced and communicated are paralleled by much more far-reaching shifts in how some cohorts in society interpret traditional notions of privacy, objectivity, and source credibility. And so far, our discipline has not done a very good job at offering answers to what have become increasingly pressing questions in various societal debates. How do social media change how we interact with one another? How does information get disseminated in a fragmented multi-channel media environment? And what does the future of (mass) communication look like?
The tricky part, of course, is that many of the answers to these questions transcend the boundaries of our discipline. This is particularly challenging for a young field, such as communication, that continues to struggle with its identity and its desire to compete on an even playing field with much larger disciplines, such as psychology and political science. And if we are not careful, we may follow these disciplines down some dead ends. A good example is the debate surrounding Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s proposal in October 2009 to prohibit the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.” Coburn, of course, used the label “political science” but targeted social science much more broadly. And his comments rekindled an old debate among political scientists about incremental disciplinary research versus big questions. Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein summarized this intra-disciplinary dilemma best: “Graduate students discussing their field … often speak in terms of ‘an interesting puzzle,’ a small intellectual conundrum… that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” [Read more...]
Four Authors/Five Books: A Reading Assignment for Media Educators and Scholars
July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Cindy Royal, Assistant Professor,
Texas State University in San Marcos
The AEJMC conference in Boston offered many of the benefits I always enjoy and appreciate at the annual gathering: seeing old friends, networking with colleagues, meeting people with whom I have been communicating online and learning about research and teaching trends. But, the conference took a different tone this outing, as there was much discussion (both online and offline, in the sessions and in the hallways) of journalism professors being out of touch with the realities of online media and the digital economy (see Guy Berger’s MediaShift post “Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change”). Criticisms included: questions and issues being addressed in sessions were outdated; research topics were tedious and mired in minutia; some social media applications, like Twitter, were viewed with disdain and condescension; and a general lack of understanding of the challenges and needs of the industries we support. As a profession, we have many big questions to answer, at such a critical time, that it has to be our responsibility as educators to assist in developing innovative solutions and drive the conversation.
It is exceedingly important that journalism as an educational and scholarly discipline embraces the new media environment and helps lead our graduates to enter their chosen fields with a spirit of innovation and the ability to influence direction. We often get wrapped up in the skills we teach. Should students learn HTML, video editing, Flash? Should they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? [Read more...]
Teaching Social Media
July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Tricia Farwell
Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University
Walk into any classroom with computer access, WiFi access or cellular phone service and you will, most likely, find at least one student on Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. The students will tell you how they “get” social networking sites. Put up a few (usually less than sober) pictures. Post a few status updates ranging from song lyrics to what they did last night. Et voila! You have instant social media expertise through user experience without training.
However, some industry professionals appear to be less confident about their use and understanding of social media; they are still trying to discover the most meaningful way to incorporate it into their profession. Slips such as the infamous Memphis Twitter post by a Ketchum Vice President have shown organizations how a misstep can be a public relations disaster. In this case, the employee posted to his Twitter feed while waiting to meet with the client (FedEx). The post (http://shankman.com/wp-content/uploads//keyinfluencertweet.jpg) read: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here!’” Understandably, FedEx employees were upset and the Ketchum employee experienced how public social networking can be.
While these social networking may not change the messages that the organizations intend to deliver to the public, the tools are impacting the way the messages are delivered. Century 21, for example transferred its national television advertising budget to focus on online media (Bush). The switch provided the company a way to open the lines of communication with publics by using vehicles most often thought to be, if not free at least inexpensive (Johnson). [Read more...]
Rethinking Media Writing
July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Tricia Farwell
Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University
Back in the dark ages, during my undergraduate education, there were two choices for me as a student (or at least that was how I saw things). Option one was to be on the print side of the world. Option two was to be on the broadcast side. In my mind, the two were never to meet. The broadcast students scrambled into their editing bays and studios; they played with pictures and sound. In my mind, print reigned supreme. We had words to craft into wonderful tapestries. We strutted into the computer labs, knowing that what we had to say was important.
A few courses into the program I experienced a crisis of epic proportions…I realized I didn’t like most of what was involved in being a journalist. Thanks to one wonderfully astute advisor, I was counseled to take public relations courses. I was lucky. I found a happily ever after early. Some of my friends weren’t as lucky and had to take “extra” courses when they found they didn’t like what they originally intended to pursue.
Fast forward a few years (ok, maybe a decade or two) and I find myself in a place I never expected to be: part of the curriculum committee discussing a course that, in my opinion, might help students to make slightly more informed choices. That course is our media writing course. In its current incarnation, the class is designed to be an overview of various types of writing that students of the mass media might encounter. As you can see by the sample syllabus, we try to spend a few sessions on each writing area. It’s a sampler platter, for sure, but one that may be more beneficial than harmful. [Read more...]
On Creative Media Policy
June 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
(NAF) The FTC recently hosted the final workshop in a series of three that tackled the question “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” Comments from the assembled experts and observers ran a by-now-familiar gamut of pleading special cases and offering standalone solutions.
Media execs, pundits and professors offered up predictions that the market would solve everything, cautious optimism about new nonprofit news experiments, and controversial proposals for taxing advertisements or small electronics in order to fund more public media… READ IT