Michael Bugeja, who directs the Greenlee School at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide (Oxford University Press, 2005), which won the Clifford Christians Award for research in media ethics, and Living Ethics across media platforms (Oxford, 2008), which calls for a moral convergence to accompany the technological one.

Bugeja’s research has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Futurist, The International Herald Tribune (France), Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada), The Guardian (UK) and The Economist, among others. His articles have appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, New Media and Society, and Journal of Mass Media Ethics, among others.

Bugeja also writes professionally for such publications as The Quill, Editor & Publisher and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Bugeja became director of the Greenlee School in 2003. Previously he was a journalism professor at Ohio University and a media adviser at Oklahoma State University. In the 1970s, he worked as state editor for United Press International and holds a Ph.D. from OSU and a master’s from South Dakota State University.

How do you define mass communication?

This is an excellent question because we cannot yet answer it sufficiently enough to create a business model for major news outlets struggling with Internet and converged platforms. In the past, the power of the technology–whether it was a 64-inch six-color sheet-fed press or a 50,000 watt radio station–was aligned proportionately with the target market mass audience. The rule was, the larger the investment, the greater the audience or the potential for the mass. Now, a high school blogger has the means to broadcast, telecast or publish worldwide through the laptop in her bedroom; so technology and investment no longer are reliable gauges of mass audience.

To be sure, the technology of old media was its chief expense, as in the purchase and storage of paper and ink, or the cost and maintenance of a printing press, or the equipping of a broadcast tower and studio (not to mention a fleet of delivery trucks or television vans and the upkeep and insurance on them). The sheer cost of such technology kept the news in aristocratic hands. The democratization of media, which continues to this day globally, has taken news out of those hands and placed it in the populace’s, giving the audience a google of outlets associated with lifestyle choices or psychographics.

The disconnect between the power of the technology and the size of the audience has generated this question–how do we define a mass, by its potential for or actual audience?–data that can fluctuate wildly from day to day, yet again undermining business models based on reader or viewer audits by which to establish advertising rates. [Read more...]