The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has published a new online report on the coverage of U.S.-Mexico drug trafficking. It is available for free download. [Read more...]
Free online report about coverage of U.S.–Mexico drug trafficking
September 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The push for paywalls mischaracterizes the nature of online newspaper readership
July 20, 2010 By 1 Comment
As U.S. newspaper publishers increasingly talk of building paywalls around their online content to ward off free-riders cannibalizing their print product, new research suggests that such efforts may backfire because most local users of local newspaper sites already are paying customers—by paying for the print edition.
A study published in the latest issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly found that two-thirds of visitors to local newspaper websites are “hybrid” readers—that is, they regularly read the print edition (and most of them pay for it) as well as the online version—in contrast to the remaining one-third of “online-only” readers. [Read more...]
Social Media in the Classroom: Twitter and Journalists
April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Dominic Lasorsa, University of Texas at Austin
I have found an approach for incorporating the study of social media into the college curriculum that can be used with courses of different sizes and to study different social media. The project shows students that social media serve different functions for different users with different consequences, that as means of mass communication social media are relevant to journalists’ work, and that scientific methods can be employed to help answer intriguing questions, such as how new technologies affect journalists’ work.
I chose Twitter because journalists have become heavy users and because it is one of the newer online social media. Twitter is a form of “microblogging,” a means of communication in which short (no more than 140-character) messages are sent to other users who have chosen to follow the sender. Twitter “followers” are similar to Facebook “friends.” [Read more...]