VIDEO: What the Study of Computer Game Players Can Teach Journalists

This video is a companion to the blog post, Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists by Brad King, Assistant Professor and Emerging Media Fellow, Ball State University.

More from Brad King

• Why Digital Rights Management Won’t Save the News
• Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists
• VIDEO: What the Study of Computer Game Players Can Teach Journalists
• Extreme Social Media

Stop the Presses! Revamped Journalism Courses Attract Hordes of Students

The Chronicle of Higher Education • 09-21-09
Source: http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-the-Presses-Revamped/48497/

Stop the Presses! Revamped Journalism Courses Attract Hordes of Students
Even as job prospects dim, a focus on new media and entrepreneurship produces record enrollments
By Katherine Mangan

At a time when the newspaper industry is in free fall and thousands of jobs are being cut each year, one would think that the halls of the nation’s journalism schools would be awfully quiet. Think again.

Many universities report that journalism enrollments are up this year. Over the past few weeks, a lot of these budding journalists have been blogging, broadcasting, and tweeting their way through introductory courses that have been revamped to embrace the digital age.

Applications to Columbia University’s master-of-science program in journalism rose 44 percent, to 1,181, for the class entering this fall, and an investigative-journalism specialty drew more than twice as many applications this year than last year, up from 54 in 2008 to 121 this year.

Elsewhere, applications to master’s programs were up 30 percent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 25 percent at the University of Maryland at College Park, and 24 percent at Stanford University.

Students in Temple U.’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab interview people in Philadelphia neighborhoods where stories often go unreported, the program’s director says.

Enrollment in undergraduate journalism programs nationwide has grown 35 percent over the past 10 years, to 201,477, and was up slightly in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.

“There are still plenty of people who love to write and think that their journalism degree will serve as an entree to just about any field they could go into,” says Barbara B. Hines, president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Dismal Job Outlook

Being flexible is important during tough times. A report released last month found that in 2008, graduates of journalism and mass-communication programs had far fewer job interviews and offers than in 2007, and that full-time employment was at its lowest point since at least 1986.

The report is based on an annual survey conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Some 2,542 graduates of bachelor’s and master’s-degree programs at 86 institutions responded.

The report blamed the declines on “the sharp downturn in the national economy and the collapse of the economic model for media industries.” Paper Cuts, a blog that tracks layoffs in the U.S. newspaper industry, has recorded more than 29,000 layoffs and buyouts since 2008.

Only six in 10 graduates had full-time employment six to eight months after earning their degrees, the Georgia report noted. Graduates of newspaper and telecommunications programs fared worse than those pursuing careers in advertising and public relations, whose programs are often housed in the same colleges.

Hunter Walker, a student in the master’s program in journalism at Columbia, shared his concerns on Gawker.com, a New York-based media-and-gossip blog, after his orientation session last month. “I owe this school a lot of money,” he wrote, “and I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to come up with it.”

Columbia’s 10-month program costs about $49,000; with living expenses factored in, the cost is $70,000.

It was a “scary time” to be a journalism student, Mr. Walker wrote, but he remained optimistic that his training in research, writing and investigative skills would land him a job … somewhere.

Push Toward Multimedia

Part of the draw for students still flocking to journalism schools is a new generation of courses retooled for new media. The same rapidly changing technology that is creating headaches for many media executives appeals to a generation of students who grew up playing computer games and texting and now tweeting their friends on the microblog Twitter.

“These students are also very comfortable multitasking, and they like the allure of doing different things every day,” says Ms. Hines, who is director of Howard University’s graduate program in mass communication and media studies.

Bill Grueskin, who left his job as managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online last year to become dean of academic affairs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, believes some students see opportunity in the industry turmoil. “Ambitious and creative young people see this as an opportunity to be part of the effort to recast and remake journalism,” he says.

At Columbia incoming graduate students attend a multimedia boot camp, and the introductory “Reporting and Writing” course has been overhauled to include more multimedia content. Students are also required to take a course in the business of journalism so they will better understand the seismic changes shaking up the profession.

“We want all students, even those with fairly traditional aspirations, to understand the nexus of journalism and technology in a broader way,” says Mr. Grueskin. “Any technological skill you teach them in 2009 will be obsolete by 2012, but we want them to understand that this is the beginning of a lifelong process they need to be open to.”

The University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism also requires incoming graduate students to participate in a multimedia boot camp, which runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for five days. Lessons in multimedia storytelling are reinforced in a required class in Web publishing skills that runs parallel to one in basic reporting. Students learn how to use digital video, audio, and photo equipment.

Students were also blogging last month from American University’s three-week multimedia boot camp and sharing videos of the speakers on YouTube.

Two years ago, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism introduced a revamped curriculum emphasizing multimedia storytelling and lessons in “audience understanding” (The Chronicle, August 10, 2007).

Skeptical Professors

A number of faculty members, however, object that gadgets are being emphasized over reporting fundamentals.

Ari L. Goldman, a professor of journalism at Columbia, says basic skills like accuracy and fairness are more important than ever at a time when inexperienced reporters are rushing to post news updates on the Web, often with little editorial oversight.

“I don’t want us to lose focus on the standards of good journalism in our rush to embrace all the latest technology,” says Mr. Goldman, who wrote for The New York Times for 20 years.

“I want to give students a consciousness that there’s a need to be thorough and not just be first–to consider the importance of fact-checking, copy editing, spelling, and grammar, and to make sure they are armed with all those tools as they write and put things on the Web.”

Ms. Hines, of Howard, says journalism professors are struggling to integrate constantly changing multimedia skills into already jammed curricula without sacrificing attention to the nuts and bolts of good journalism.

If technology is overemphasized, she says, “students will be whizzes at singing and dancing and making the equipment work, but they may not understand why zoning is important in a community, or how a city council functions.”

Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, at Iowa State University, agrees.

“Many journalism schools, to please industry, started creating courses that were merely about presentation, and they forgot about content,” says Mr. Bugeja, who would rather see most technological training take place on the job.

“Too often, when the technology is overemphasized in the curriculum, it gives the impression that you can do journalism sitting down in your pajamas,” he says. “You can’t do that.”

To become good journalists, he argues, students need to get out into the field and spend time with their sources.

Covering the Neighborhoods

That is what journalism students are doing in Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, although they are taking the technology with them.

The students tell stories about underserved and underreported local communities via print, broadcast, and Web media. When they head out on assignments, they use digital video cameras along with reporters’ notebooks. They hand neighborhood residents other, pocket-sized video cameras to record their own stories. Students are trained to use video-editing software and can enhance their reports with audio slide shows.

But the program still pushes reporting skills, with or without gadgets and gizmos. “The mainstream media don’t go into these communities unless there’s yellow police tape and something bad has happened,” says Christopher Harper, an associate professor of journalism who co-directs the lab. “Our students are there all the time, burning up shoe leather.”

Other journalism schools, including those at Berkeley and the City University of New York, have been pursuing such “hyperlocal” reporting, sending students into diverse neighborhoods to report on the day-to-day news that shrinking mainstream newspapers don’t cover. But while hyperlocal Web sites are springing up, and some community newspapers are growing, salaries remain low. “Our students are saddled with an average of $30,000 in debt,” says Mr. Harper. “They can’t pay that back on a $25,000 salary at a community newspaper.”

Reinventing a Profession

Journalism schools are also trying to give students the tools they need to invent new models of the profession.

In addition to multimedia skills, Temple also teaches an elective undergraduate course on “entrepreneurial journalism,” which, according to the syllabus, helps students “understand the changing media landscape and recognize underserved niches.” Students study why the field is changing so fast, anticipate which direction it will go, design business models, and begin the process of creating new journalistic outlets.

“There’s not a great future in working for mainstream media,” says Mr. Harper. “The future is for smart, hard-working students to band together, create their own media, and make a business out of it–and that’s what a lot of them are doing.”

Christopher Wink hopes to be part of that reinvented future. He graduated from Temple last year and spent three months stringing for daily newspapers in Pennsylvania before heading on a European backpacking trip with a journalism-school friend.

“We returned to an economy in recession and the print industry in free fall and said, ‘Hell, let’s build something of our own,’” he says. In February the duo began publishing Technically Philly, a news site that covers local technology and innovation.

Although it has yet to make a profit, Mr. Wink remains optimistic. “I very much feel in this media environment you have to create your own job,” he says.

Source: http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-the-Presses-Revamped/48497/

Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

by Brad King
Assistant Professor, Journalism,
Emerging Media Fellow, Ball State University Center for Media Design
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.

That’s a technological leap, though. The other leap came from the people. Thanks to Ultima Online, thousands of people could exist in a virtual space in real time. Everything existed within a communal space, which meant Richard Garriott, the designer, and the rest of the Ultima Online team had to figure out how to foster and negotiate that community of people.

* * *

What does this have to do with journalism? The answer is everything.

MMORPGs don’t have much to offer in terms of developing the traditional journalism skills. These games can’t teach students how to vet sources, how to interview, how to copy edit, how to hit the streets and find stories.

What they can teach journalists is how to build, foster and interact with an online community. As news organizations and journalism schools struggle to find their way in the shifting, interactive landscape that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, the answers to many of their questions lie in the history of computer gaming.

* * *

The founding of the first interactive communities, the Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and other interactive, multi-player text adventures is incidental. However, one of the first MUD developers, Richard Bartle, who would go on to become one of the foremost experts on game players, began studying how people interacted with each other. And it’s his expertise where we can begin to learn about communities. Read more

New study shows how journalism ethics developed

Three commissions that investigated violence in the 1960s had a significant impact on the development of widely accepted views about journalism ethics, according to a study published in the summer 2009 issue of Journalism & Communication Monographs.

In a monograph titled “Two Visions of Responsibility: How National Commissions Contributed to Journalism Ethics, 1963-1975,” Glen Feighery says it was not just the work of the Hutchins Commission or the Watergate investigation that prompted media organizations to focus more on social responsibility, but that the work of three commissions, The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, and the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, offered significant advice on how journalists should ethically approach their work. The media responded with revisions of codes of ethics, the creation of news councils and journalism reviews, and increased employment of minorities.

Feighery argues that through this challenge and response, a heightened sense of media responsibility arose. Part of the evolution within journalism ethics at the time forced journalists to consider the relationship between their independence and their responsibility, Journalists valued their freedom from entities of authority, such as government, special interest groups, etc., but they also recognized a duty to adequately inform the public about existing problems. This strong sense of responsibility required journalists to go a step beyond minimizing harm and provide people with information that would allow them to make an informed decision.

Feighery argues that journalists struck the balance between freedom and responsibility by developing the approach of “autonomy,” which meant that journalists would follow self-imposed restraints. As a result, journalists could maintain their independence and work for the greater good of the public, creating an ethical approach that continued to influence the media in the decades following the 1970s .

Feighery is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah.

CONTACT: Glen Feighery, University of Utah, Office Phone: (801) 585-7521, Email: glen.feighery@utah.edu.

• Two Visions of Responsibility: How National Commissions Contributed to Journalism Ethics, 1963-1975, By Glen Feighery
• Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs
• Research You Can Use

Research You Can Use is produced by a volunteer group of faculty and staff within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The group selects new research from AEJMC refereed journals that may interest journalists. Journalists may use the releases for stories or for continuing education.

A PDF version of all participating articles are available for download. For a reprint, contact the person cited or Jennifer McGill, Executive Director, AEJMC, 234 Outlet Pointe Blvd., Ste. A, Columbia, SC 29210-5667, e-mail: AEJMCHQ@aol.com, telephone: (803) 798-0271. For more information about the Research You Can Use project, please contact Mich Sineath, e-mail: AEJMCpr@aol.com.

Science and media disconnect? Maybe not, says a new study

The prevailing wisdom among many scientists and scientific organizations is that, as a rule, scientists are press shy, and those who aren’t are mavericks.

However, a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers, published in the current issue (summer 2009) of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, suggests otherwise. The study, conducted by journalism professor Sharon Dunwoody, life sciences communication professor Dominique Brossard and graduate student Anthony Dudo, provides evidence that many mainstream scientists occasionally work with journalists and some do so routinely. And the interplay between scientists and journalists, say Brossard and Dunwoody, has been remarkably stable since the 1980s.

“By and large, scientists speak to journalists, they know it is important and they’re willing to do it again,” Dunwoody says. “The frequency with which scientists and journalists interact has been pretty stable over time.”

The findings, extracted from a survey of 1,200 researchers in the areas of epidemiology and stem cell research, two fields that experience extensive news media attention, contradict the widespread view in science that scientists are out of touch.

“We found relatively frequent interactions,” says Brossard, explaining that about one-third of the respondents claimed to have had up to five contacts with journalists during a three-year period, while another third of the sample said they experienced more than six contacts with reporters over three years. Only one-third of respondents reported having no contacts with journalists.

“The frequencies are definitely encouraging,” adds Brossard.

The proportion of scientists in the sample who interact with journalists, according to the Wisconsin researchers, is intriguingly similar to studies from the 1980s, as well as patterns identified in the 1990s. The new data imply that journalistic engagement of scientists over time is greater and more stable than “persistent, anecdotal cautionary tales would suggest,” Dunwoody, Brossard and Dudo write.

Another key insight from the data is that it is generally not the case that journalists focus their attention on scientific outliers. Instead, scientists who interact most frequently with reporters tend to be senior, highly productive researchers or administrators. “The notion that journalists concentrate on mavericks is not true,” says Dunwoody. “That’s an important pattern. What it says is that journalists are working mostly with successful mainstream scientists.”

The results of the new study are important because they chip away at the common perception among scientists that media coverage of science is flawed. “We don’t know if the interactions are, in fact, better,” says Dunwoody. “But scientists are eager participants. It reflects a more active role by one of the major players in the process.”

The new study, according to Dunwoody, indicates that although scientists may have a general perception that news media coverage of science is faulty, that perception does not extend to coverage of their own work. “They often view their own work as being covered well, but that doesn’t influence the larger perception.”

The involvement of scientists in active public communication is widely viewed as critical, especially when controversial issues are at play or important policy is being forged. Coverage of such things as stem cell research, infectious disease, nuclear power, nanotechnology and biotechnology frequently entails important information about human health and has economic and social implications that reach far beyond the scientific community.

“We need to keep in mind that most people learn about scientific topics through mass media and not informal channels like science museums,” says Brossard. “Hence, the necessity for scientists to engage journalists.”

Another key insight from the study is that the scientists who work with journalists perceive that they do so not for personal gain but because their participation can influence public understanding of science and the role of science in society. In short, appealing to scientists’ moral or ethical values may be a way to increase participation in the process of making news.

Finally, the study provides evidence that scientists who have been trained or otherwise briefed about how to work with journalists are more likely to engage reporters.

CONTACT: Sharon Dunwoody, 608-263-3389, dunwoody@wisc.edu; Dominique Brossard, 608-262-0482, dbrossard@wisc.edu

• Socialization or Rewards? Predicting U.S. Scientist-Media Interactions by Sharon Dunwoody, Dominique Brossard, and Anthony Dudo
• Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
• Research You Can Use

Research You Can Use is produced by a volunteer group of faculty and staff within the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The group selects new research from AEJMC refereed journals that may interest journalists. Journalists may use the releases for stories or for continuing education.

A PDF version of all participating articles are available for download. For a reprint, contact the person cited or Jennifer McGill, Executive Director, AEJMC, 234 Outlet Pointe Blvd., Ste. A, Columbia, SC 29210-5667, e-mail: AEJMCHQ@aol.com, telephone: (803) 798-0271. For more information about the Research You Can Use project, please contact Mich Sineath, e-mail: AEJMCpr@aol.com.