Book Review – Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Napoli, Philip M. (2011). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 240.

Philip M. Napoli provides a critical cultural examination of the evolution of the concept of audience, beginning with its twentieth-century definition by media theorists and media practitioners. Persons within media industries, academia, and the consumer have redefined the conceptualization of audience, given the onset of the Internet in the twenty-first century. Napoli’s ideas help to shed light on the conceptualization of “audience” for the future. Scholars of journalism, mass communication, and cultural studies (as well as business) will find useful information in Napoli’s book, which provides new entrees into understanding how socially constructed definitions of audience are changing.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Educator Summer 2011, Research Tagged With: , , , ,

Book Review – Refiguring Mass Communication: A History

May 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson (2010). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. pp. 261.

Journalism teachers are naturally intrigued by the relationship between periods in history, which logically follows the evolution of economics, technology, and sociological developments. What author Peter Simonson does in his Refiguring Mass Communication: A History suggests that not only do these relationships transcend those traditional avenues, but he also reclaims the strength, potential, and promise of both the practical and aesthetic purposes of mass communication.

And he does it by telling great stories and showing connections between them.

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Filed Under: Educator Winter 2010, Reviews Tagged With: , , ,

The Challenge We Face Today

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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By Elliot King, Loyola University Maryland

History • Among the widespread upheaval underway in journalism is a redefinition of the role of the academy in journalism education. Outright scorn for the study of journalism in college and universities has long been one of the odd and rather remarkable features of the journalism profession. It is hard to think of any other professional occupation in which it practitioners denigrated what students could learn if they studied a field as their undergraduate majors. Students interested in journalism were urged by professionals to study something else. The journalism was best learned on the job, the argument went.

Well, those days are over. Nobody pretends that any organization has the time or resources to teach entry-level journalists the tools of the trade. In fact, the opposite is true. The most common entry-level position in broadcast news is that of a backpack journalist, somebody who can report, use the camera, and edit the package. These are skills learned in journalism school these days, not in the field. In fact, for the first time, I have heard several job seekers report that people in the field are telling them to get masters degrees in journalism and master’s degrees give people a big advantage in the job search. [Read more...]

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Book Review: Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. John Maxwell Hamilton. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 680 pp. $45 hbk.

This monumental yet eminently readable book starts to fill a major hole in mass communication history literature: the development of foreign correspondence. Full of bright word paintings, Journalism’s Roving Eye touches on almost all big- and small-picture issues, and provides a pithy review of U.S. journalism history from colonial times to the present. Since, as author John Maxwell Hamilton argues in the last chapter, virtually all mass communication today has an international component, the book is a most welcome addition to complementary reading lists in journalism history undergraduate classes and could interest graduate students despite its lack of a theoretical framework. [Read more...]

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Book Review: Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist. Gary Scharnhorst. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 306 pp. $27.95 hbk.

This biography fully explores the life of a fascinating nineteenth-century independent woman journalist. She was a publicist, an entrepreneur, and a journalist. She died pursuing a story.

Kate Field’s parents were stage artists, although her father moved between the theatrical and journalistic worlds. Kate was an only child who always aspired to the stage and who, from time to time, performed, although rarely to hearty reviews. She was a success, however, on the lecture circuit, due both to her reputation and stage ability.

Many of Kate Field’s letters have been destroyed, presenting a particular challenge to this biographer, University of New Mexico English Professor Gary Scharnhorst, who relied almost entirely on published sources. [Read more...]

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Book Review: Media, History, Society: A Cultural History of U.S. Media

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Media, History, Society: A Cultural History of U.S. Media. Janet M. Cramer. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 296 pp. $89.95 hbk. $39.95 pbk.

The back cover of Janet Cramer’s Media, History, Society: A Cultural History of U.S. Media says that the book “offers a cultural history of media in the United States, shifting the lens of media history from media developments and evolution to a focus on changes in culture and society, and emphasizing how media shaped and were shaped by societal trends, policies, and cultural shifts.” For those of us who blend cultural studies with history in both research and teaching, this suggests an alternative to traditional approaches found in many media history texts.

Cramer’s book is organized conceptually, and is divided into four major sections: Media and Government, Media and Commerce, Media and Community, and a Conclusion, each subdivided into chapters that cover a broad span of time. For example, Media and Government begins with a discussion of the First Amendment and how it developed in response to earlier Western European ideas about monarchical control of information, then moves on to a chapter on censorship in wartime, and ends with more recent debates over free speech. Media and Commerce discusses the emergence of the market model and the Penny Press, as well as the rise of newspapers as an industry. How audiences changed in the wake of emerging broadcast technologies and entertainment media are also included here. [Read more...]

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