in Journalism and Mass Communication
The Columbia Journalism Review has published articles on the latest FCC report on the state of media and journalism. We’ve linked to both an article about the FCC report and a Q&A they had with the FCC report author, Steve Waldman.
- Heavy On Problems, Light On Solutions: The FCC Report Has Landed – CJR, June 9
- Q&A With FCC Report Head Writer Steve Waldman – CJR, June 20 & 21
The Information Needs of Communities
You can read the full FCC report below.
This month the FCC released their report, Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.
You can read the full report below.
The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records. David Cuillier and Charles N. Davis (2010). Washington: CQ Press. pp. 236.
Free For All: The Internet’s Transformation of Journalism. Elliot King (2010). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. pp. 328.
If data-driven reporting is a hallmark of the information society, then Cuillier and Davis’ 236-page tome has burst upon that society as a sort of elixir: What spinach is to Popeye, this book would be to public affairs journalists.
“[Y]ou could produce 10 years’ worth of [document-driven reporting] projects from this one book” (p. xxv), the authors boast in the preface. It is not a vain boast. Story ideas ooze from the nine chapters, marshalling a superlative guide to producing record-driven local and hyper-local stories.
By Dane S. Claussen in Academe Online in the May/June 2011 Issue – The June 2008 cover of the Washington Post Magazine featured reporter Liza Mundy’s article “The Amazing Adventures of Supergrad.” Under this title ran the teaser, “The most sophisticated, accomplished, entitled graduates ever produced by American colleges are heading into the workplace. And employers are falling all over themselves to vie for their talents.”
The lengthy piece portrays Emma Clippinger, then a Brown University junior who was double-majoring in developmental studies and comparative literature, serving as captain of the equestrian team, and helping run Gardens for Health International, an organization she cofounded that focuses on the nutrition of HIV-positive Rwandans. Clippinger also is noted for having worked on Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, having interned with the Clinton Foundation, and being fluent in French (along with speaking some Kinyarwanda and Wolof, languages in Rwanda and Senegal, respectively). Read full article
Watchdog Journalism: The Art of Investigative Reporting. Stephen J. Berry. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. 304 pp.
Even seasoned journalism instructors with substantial industry experience face the same problem year after year—how can journalistic writing, particularly about complex topics, be “taught?” Having students read example after example of interpretive stories, investigative stories, or other samples of long-form journalism — complete with discussion — seems like the simplest way, although many students quickly get bored with this case-study approach.
Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism — An Innovative Study of the Israeli Press. Zvi Reich. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. 244 pp.
As a cynical academic, I admit I become suspicious when an author feels compelled to use the subtitle of his/her book to state how original or “innovative” the study is. Surely show-don’t-tell applies to academic writing, too? In this case, however, the book fully lives up to the title. This is truly an innovative study, and it tackles one of the key issues of journalism studies — journalist-source relations — in a comprehensive, never-seen-before fashion.
The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. Stuart Allen, ed. New York, NY: Routledge Publications, 2010, 642 pp.
This is an important as well as very substantial and valuable undertaking—a multi-national (and multi-author) scholarly survey of the whole academic field of journalism studies. With no fewer than fifty-six papers in seven categories, the majority written by researchers outside the United States, this is a comprehensive assessment of what we know about the fast-changing state of journalism here and abroad. Coverage is wide, indeed, such that the main section headings can only suggest the real breadth of this compilation. Documentation is thorough as well.
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.
The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. Stuart Allan (ed.) (2009). Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp. 704.
Stuart Allan’s weighty book is 56 chapters over 704 pages, and this bulk is a mixed blessing. The book includes numerous authors of prominence, but it also relies too much upon the reputation of its contributors. The back cover of the book states it is for “scholars and students,” but scholars are likely to find the chapters conservative and too familiar. The benefit of this book is precisely with that student audience, who will find many accessible insights into contemporary issues and can rely on the topic diversity as a resource for learning more about journalism.
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.
