Scott Rosenberg: When It Comes to Corrections, Most News Sites Fail

July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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MediaShift | [...] Three quarters of the 28 news outlets we reviewed provide no corrections-reporting link of any kind on their home or article pages. Even media organizations that show signs of working to handle corrections carefully fall down in various ways — and lots of others don’t look like they’re even trying.

Many bury information about how to report errors behind confusing trails of links. Some provide multiple, poorly labeled avenues for feedback without telling readers which ones to use for error reports. Others provide no access to recently corrected articles beyond a search on “corrections,” which often turns up multiple stories about prisons. [Read more...]

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On the Challenges of Small Newsrooms and Mobile Communication

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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by Doug Fisher, University of South Carolina

Small, family-owned news organizations may have the best opportunity to take advantage of the digital pathway to reach their communities, but they also may be the most endangered by it and find it the most challenging.

I’ve come to that conclusion after working last summer in the newsroom of an 18,000-circulation community daily newspaper and after years of working with other editors and publishers at individual papers or small family-owned chains.

The health of these newsrooms is important to their communities. In many instances, as case studies at the Newspapers and Community-Building symposia have shown, they are among the few institutions willing and able to stand up to the power structure. Also, as has been widely noted, they generally are suffering less economically than their big-city counterparts. [Read more...]

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Discussing JMC with… Bill Cassidy

June 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Inspired by the series on social media by Danny Brown, “Discussing JMC with…” features a collection of interviews with academics from across the U.S. and abroad discussing current topics and trends in journalism and mass communication.

Bill CassidyBill Cassidy is an Associate Professor and Journalism Area Coordinator in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. The 2009-2010 head of the Newspaper Division of AEJMC, he teaches courses in print journalism, mass communication theory and graduate research methods.

His research examines influences on news media content, specifically in the areas of online journalism, media credibility and AIDS coverage. Cassidy’s work has been published in journals such as Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Atlantic Journal of Communication, and First Monday.

He earned his Ph.D. in Communication and Society from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tulsa. Prior to entering academia, Cassidy worked for more than a decade as a columnist and correspondent for Daily Racing Form, the leading publication in the Thoroughbred horse racing industry.

How do you define mass communication?

In my classes I initially address this question from the standpoint of “What is mass media?” We start with the word media which, of course, are the different technologies that facilitate communication between the senders and receivers of messages. Then when we introduce mass into the conversation, we arrive at a definition of mass media similar to the one offered in Croteau and Hoynes’ Media Society textbook, “media that reach a relatively large audience of usually anonymous readers.” I find this definition is a good starting point in addressing the fact that the distinctions between mass communication and other forms of communication are no longer so cut-and-dried. [Read more...]

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Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

March 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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by Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

When Britannia opened for business in July 1997, there was a land run. Of 100,000 people. Within days, the new homesteaders had snatched plots of land, set up businesses and built homes. In other words, they created a community. They had taken ownership.

Not that it was all roses. There were problems. There was no infrastructure available. No way to address wrongs. Britannia was a jumbled mass of human chaos.

This place was the epicenter of the first commercially success massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). This “persistent world”, which existed whether or not players were logged into the game, changed the way we viewed online communities. Suddenly, the worlds that had existed simply in text formats (e.g. The Well, CompuServe, QuantumLink) became graphical. [Read more...]

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