Dane S. Claussen is a Professor & Director of Graduate Programs at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Point Park University, Pittsburgh, Pa. He teaches Communication Law and Regulation; Applied Mass Communication Research Methods; Media Ethics and Professional Culture; Mass Communication History; Newspaper and Magazine Management; and Writing the Nonfiction Book. Dr. Claussen also regularly chairs master’s thesis committees and supervises many Directed Readings, Directed Research and Publication Project studies. (From August 2005 to May 2006, he also was Point Park’s first campus-wide Faculty Development Coordinator.) Since July 1987, Dr. Claussen has been President/Principal of American Newspaper Consultants, Ltd., a management consulting, expert witness, research, writing, editing, and publishing firm.

Dr. Claussen is Editor of the quarterly Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, one of the two major scholarly journals published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

How do you define mass communication?

Some say “mass communication” is a dead term or a dead concept, but I disagree. The question is not whether there still is mass communication, because a lot of communication is still aimed at audiences larger than a few to a few dozen friends, neighbors, co-workers, and/or relatives, but how many is “mass”? And even this is not a new concept. When Robert Rhett’s famous Charleston newspaper had a circulation of only 550, was that really a “mass medium”? We treat it as such. So why isn’t a listserv with only, say, 550 names, or a blog with only 550 regular visitors, also a “mass” medium? It is. And we still have interpersonal media: cellphones, emails, IMs, Skype, etc. As for asynchronous media, such as TV on demand or Web sites, if the intended cumulative audience is intended to be more than only a limited number of persons as above, then it also is still a “mass” medium. I never thought that the term “mass communication” required simultaneous dissemination and/or simultaneous consumption, or that “mass” necessarily meant only numbers in the tens of thousands to hundreds of millions. [Read more...]