Jeremy Littau has 10 years of experience in journalism after working at newspapers of different sizes, specializing in editing and writing both in print and online. He got his start at the Daily Democrat in Woodland, CA, and did the typical “move up the ladder” part of his career, landing at the Los Angeles Daily News in 2000. He spent four years at the Daily News before returning to school at Missouri. He earned his M.A. from Missouri in 2007 and is now in his final year in the Ph.D. program.

Jeremy’s research interests are found in new media trends in journalism and he is the author of several publications on the subject. He is currently an assistant professor at Lehigh University, specializing in multiplatform storytelling that makes use of audience conversation in the news process.

How do you define mass communication?

My answer probably won’t pop up in any textbooks, but I would define mass communication as the creation and transmission of messages for broad dissemination to an audience whose motives for consumption are imagined. I think that last part, the imagined audience receiving a broadly disseminated message, is the heart of mass communication. People working in the discipline are gathering information, constructing it into a message, and then sending it out to a faceless group of consumers. As a journalist, for example, I always tried to imagine who my readers were and what their needs were, and that led to a different style of communication than I would have with a friend, family member, or even a source I was interviewing.

Whether we’ve understood that audience as well as we should is a whole other can of worms, but that’s why we need research. [Read more...]