The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is promoting the upcoming 2010 Denver Conference August 4-7 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver, Colorado, with the launch of a new conference website, http://www.AEJMCDenver.org.

The new website utilizes the latest blogging software and new media tools available to help attendees keep in touch with people and events throughout the four-day conference. The new website will showcase complete conference coverage and help attendees:

• learn about news and sessions by day of the week and by topic;
• connect with fellow attendees and add events through message boards;
• find information about travel accommodations, including dining and nightlife;
• keep up-to-date with available marketing of books, products and services.

The 2010 AEJMC Denver Conference will feature sessions and panels on the latest research, teaching issues and public service in the various areas of journalism and mass communication.

Attendees will meet face-to-face with more than 1,600 journalism and mass communication educators; learn how to navigate the evolving job market and meet one-on-one with recruiters; and discover a great avenue to explore potential text and other resources.

AEJMC conferences are regularly attended by journalism and mass communication administrators, educators, and researchers; well-known authors and publishers of communication texts; companies and organizations tracking emerging trends in higher education; social media professionals and internet and technology professionals; and practitioners.

A full day of pre-conference workshops is on tap for August 3. Highlights from the week-long academic conference include sessions on:

The New Convergence · The Future of Media Ethics in PR and Advertising · Launching a News Web Site · New Media Economics · Political Communication & Minority Populations · Reporting on Nations in Conflict · Thinking Outside the Silos · Moving from Newsroom to Classroom · Celebrating Scholarly Life · Rebooting the Curricula · The State of the Industry: 2010.

Don’t miss your chance to connect with the world’s largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators at the college level.

For the latest news and event information, visit AEJMCDenver.org.

About AEJMC
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

A study by a team of researchers from Penn State University and the University of Hartford published in the current issue of the Journal of Public Relations Research indicates that the effects of attribution on audiences seems to depend more on who’s watching the VNR than on what the government agency is saying in it.

According to Colleen Connolly-Ahern, an Assistant Professor at Penn State University and the leader of the research team that included Susan Grantham of University of Hartford and Maria Cabrera-Baukus of Penn State, “The original reason for the legislation, and the premise upon which the GAO has operated, is that VNRs are somehow more credible when they appear to be independent news stories, and not identified as government communications. But our findings don’t indicate that at all.”

In fact, said Connolly-Ahern, the credibility of the communications seems to depend on your political affiliation. “Self-identified Republicans actually judged a VNR higher in expertise when they knew it was from a government agency, and not a traditional news story. For self-identified Democrats the effects were reversed, with Democrats finding the VNR less expert when it came from a governmental agency.” The data was collected during the last year of President Bush’s second term.

The role of government is to develop policies that support public interests and reduce risks for all citizens. But Connolly-Ahern, Grantham and Cabrera-Baukus’ findings indicate it’s important for administrators to understand that citizens may base the credibility of their communications on their relationship with the party in power.

The research was supported by a grant from the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at the Penn State College of Communications. The authors are now planning to repeat the study. “The change in administrations has given us the chance to see whether or not the findings are different under a Democratic administration,” said Connolly-Ahern.

Contacts: Colleen Connolly-Ahern, Assistant Professor, College of Communications, Penn State University, connolly-ahern@psu.edu or Susan Grantham, Associate Professor, School of Communication, University of Hartford, Grantham@hartford.edu

• Download The Effects of Attribution of VNRs and Risk on News Viewers’ Assessments of Credibility by Colleen Connolly-Ahern, Penn State University; Susan Grantham, University of Hartford; and Maria Cabrera-Baukus, Penn State University.
• More from Journal of Public Relations Research
• More 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.

The study’s researcher Scott Maier, journalism professor at the University of Oregon, will lead a LIVE online chat at 12 p.m. EST on Thursday, February 18 to discuss the future of online journalism with a panel of new media experts:

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Kathy Best is managing editor, digital news and innovation, at The Seattle Times. Best joined The Seattle Times in February 2007, simultaneously making a leap across the country and across the print/digital divide. She works with a staff of 25 producers, designers and engineers at seattletimes.com and is the bridge between the Times newsroom and its online operations.

Before joining the Times, Best was the assistant managing editor for Sunday, national and foreign news at The Baltimore Sun; assistant managing editor/metro at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; and assistant managing editor/metro at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Prior to her move into editing, Best was a reporter for 15 years in Illinois and Washington, D.C. She and her husband, investigative reporter Andrew Schneider, live in Des Moines, WA.

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Melissa Ludtke is the editor of Nieman Reports, a quarterly magazine about journalism published by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (www.niemanreports.org). She is the author of “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America,” (1997, Random House and 1999, University of California Press).

Ludtke’s  journalism career began as a freelancer with ABC Sports; she went to Sports Illustrated, CBS News, and Time magazine where she worked as a reporter/researcher; at Time, Melissa became a correspondent at Time, reporting primarily on children and family issues, as well as on the 1984 presidential campaign and the 1984 Summer Olympics. As a baseball reporter at Sports Illustrated, she was the plaintiff in a 1997 federal lawsuit (Ludtke v. Kuhn) to gain equal access for women reporters to interview major league players.

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Jane B. Singer is an associate professor in the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire (UK). From 2007 to 2009, she was the Johnston Press Chair in Digital Journalism at UCLan.

Singer’s research explores digital journalism, including changing roles, perceptions, norms and practices. Before earning her Ph.D. in journalism from the University of Missouri, she was the first news manager of Prodigy Interactive Services. She also has worked as a newspaper reporter and editor. She currently is president of Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honor society.

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Scott Maier’s 20-year career as a newspaper and wire-service reporter includes covering city hall, the state legislature, Latin America, and a variety of other news beats. He was founder of CAR Northwest, an industry-academic partnership providing training in computer-assisted reporting to newsrooms and journalism classrooms.

Maier’s research interests include newsroom numeracy, media accuracy, diffusion of new technology and managing newsrooms for technological change. Maier received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his M.A. from the University of Southern California.

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To participate in the live event, visit http://aejmc.org/topics/newsroom/chat/, type in your name and chat!

The AEJMC Scholars Program is designed to develop and nurture outstanding teachers and researchers in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing partial funding for research or teaching projects.

The program awards $2,500 research and teaching grants to up to four AEJMC members or teams to encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication.

Proposals were solicited in the fall of 2009, and selections were made in January 2010.

Each proposal selected for funding was also matched with a recognized scholar to serve as a mentor throughout the project. The mentor will serve as a resource and sounding board as the work progresses.

AEJMC expects to showcase initial results from the first round of these grants at a special session at the 2010 AEJMC Denver Conference.

Meet the Scholars

• Bill Herman & Minjeong Kim: The Internet Defends Itself: The Network Neutrality Debate on the Web
• Heather LaMarre: Citizen Journalism and Social Media in the 2010 Election
• Jasmine McNealy: A Survey of Subpoenas against Anonymous Internet Speakers and Outcomes
• Leigh Moscowitz: Gay Marriage in the News

For more information about the AEJMC Scholars Program, contact Mich Sineath, AEJMC Public Relations

LaMarre continues to develop a strong research program addressing timely and relevant questions about new trends and innovations in journalism and mass communication. Her work has been published in top communication Journals including Communication Research, Mass Communication and Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, and Communication Quarterly. Professor LaMarre presents regularly at communication conferences such as AEJMC, ICA, NCA, and MAPOR where she has won research awards and been recognized for scholarship excellence.

Heather’s Project: Citizen Journalism and Social Media in the 2010 Election

The 2008 Presidential election included an unprecedented use of social media. Both party’s nominees employed the use of Facebook, MySpace, and other social media websites, but the use of new media went well beyond the simple posting of messages and campaign updates online. The YouTube debates, text messaging, blogs, and interactive online discussions were among the new innovations in the 2008 election. Were these new messaging techniques just a new platform to reach audiences, or were they uniquely different? Have we moved into a new era of political campaigning where candidates can use social media and new technologies to go around the established press? Will political journalism ever be the same, and what does this mean for citizen involvement in democracy? These are just a few of the questions inspiring this project.

Using a panel design, I will follow a highly contentious congressional race in Minnesota’s 6th District throughout 2010. Two groups of panelists will follow the congressional race using either cable news, newspapers, and face to face discussions (traditional media panel) or YouTube, Facebook, and blog discussions (social media panel). Panelists will watch debates, read articles, and participate in focus groups. Additionally, candidates will all watch election night results (in person or via web-cam) together provide reactions. Four waves of data will be collected and used to compare the processes and effects of political news consumption through traditional and social media.

In addition to the 4 wave panel design described above, incumbant, Michele Bachmann (D-MN) has agreed to serve as a case study for the use of social media in her campaign. Ms. Bachmann will provide interviews with herself and her top campaign staff, as well as allow us to follow her from an insider perspective.

Taken together, this project promises to be a state-of- the-art examination of the changing nature of media in political campaigns. I am both excited and honored to be a part of the AEJMC scholars program and appreciate their support with this research.

Newsroom: AEJMC Names 2010 Scholars

The AEJMC Scholars Program awards $2,500 research and teaching grants to up to four AEJMC teams to encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing partial funding for research or teaching projects. Proposals selected for funding are matched with a recognized scholar to serve as a mentor throughout the project.

Jasmine’s Project: A Survey of Subpoenas against Anonymous Internet Speakers and Outcomes

In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected anonymous speech. The court ruled that anonymity was shield protecting anonymous speakers from physical, economic and social reprisal for communicating their sometimes unpopular ideas. It seems, however, that the McIntyre ruling has not been extended to those commenting anonymously online.

This project will examine the jurisprudence regarding subpoenas that seek to identify anonymous Internet speakers. Specifically, this project will analyze the situations in which courts have issued subpoenas ordering the release of identity information, the reasons for the subpoenas, and whether the speakers were ultimately unmasked. Ultimately, using legal research methods, this project will attempt to establish an overview of the limits of anonymous Internet speech. To do so, this project will examine (1) the subpoenas that have been issued against anonymous Internet speakers; (2) the claims against the speaker; (3) the vehicle for the anonymous statements (ie, newspaper article comment, blog post, forum post, etc.); and (4) the outcomes of the subpoenas (or court cases if such materialized). Further, this research will edify or disprove prior forecasts about how the courts will or should handle cases involving anonymous online speech.

Newsroom: AEJMC Names 2010 Scholars

The AEJMC Scholars Program awards $2,500 research and teaching grants to up to four AEJMC teams to encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing partial funding for research or teaching projects. Proposals selected for funding are matched with a recognized scholar to serve as a mentor throughout the project.

He has published in journals such as Communication Law & Policy and the Federal Communications Law Journal. His dissertation is a study of the politics of copyright and digital rights management over the last 20 years. It explores not only how this area of law has changed over time, but also how new participants such as nongovermental organizations have changed the debate—including these new entrants’ creative uses of the internet.

Bill has testified at the U.S. Copyright Office, and he has been cited by the Congressional Research Service and in congressional testimony.

Minjeong Kim is an assistant professor of Journalism and Technical Communication at the Colorado State University. She completed her M.A. and Ph.D. from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Minjeong studies media law, copyright law, and other First Amendment issues in cyberspace. Her research has been published in the Communication Law and Policy, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Newspaper Research Journal, and Asian Communication Research. She also has presented numerous research papers at regional, national, and international conventions. She has been a member of AEJMC since 2002, and she is serving as a teaching chair of the Law and Policy Division this year. She teaches an undergraduate course on communication law and a introductory course on computer-mediated visual communication at the Colorado State University. She also taught a graduate seminar on cyberlaw in spring 2009. Before joining the CSU faculty in fall 2008, Kim was an assistant professor at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu where she taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on communication law and research methods. She is a native Korean who enjoys being a citizen of the world.

Bill and MinJeong’s Project: The Internet Defends Itself: The Network Neutrality Debate on the Web

The purpose of this project is to examine the net neutrality debate as it is happening online. The project will help test the claim that the Internet is a powerful new means of political communication by those who are otherwise disadvantaged in formal policy venues and offline media. Although there are some qualitative case studies of policy advocates’ online communication, there are few quantitative studies comparing online and offline messages within a given policy debate. The proposed study will help to fill this gap by exploring quantitatively how those who are less able to contact policymakers directly and/or to get their message into the mainstream media have utilized online communication to leverage their collective energy in the debate about net neutrality. Also, by comparing and contrasting the net neutrality debate in offline media and with the debate online, the proposed project is expected to shed additional light on the relationship between institutionalized, mainstream media and online media and their respective roles in shaping the public debate in communication policy.

The proposed project will explore the core websites in the online debate over network neutrality in three steps. First, we will use an online network analysis tool, the Issue Crawler, to conduct a network analysis of the websites of policy advocates that engage in the online debate over network neutrality. Second, we will use targeted Google searching to identify the relevant documents on each organization’s website. Finally, we will use content analysis to identify the network neutrality position of each document-and thus of each website and the online debate overall.

Newsroom: AEJMC Names 2010 Scholars

The AEJMC Scholars Program awards $2,500 research and teaching grants to up to four AEJMC teams to encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing partial funding for research or teaching projects. Proposals selected for funding are matched with a recognized scholar to serve as a mentor throughout the project.

Leigh’s Project: Gay Marriage in the News

The contemporary debate over same-sex marriage rights in the U.S. continues to be a central battle waged in the culture wars. In the past eight months alone, five states have made moves to legalize gay marriage, and think tanks and media outlets alike show a sea-change in growing public support for gay marriage. Still, battles continue over the legality of California’s Proposition 8 that outlawed same-sex marriage in the state during the 2008 election. In a similar move, voters in Maine recently overturned gay marriage rights in their state. These events have once again elevated the same-sex marriage debate in mainstream news media and public discourse.

This proposed research project builds upon my previous analysis of coverage of the gay marriage issue in 2003 and 2004 in order to investigate reporting on these recent shifts and developments in 2008 and 2009. Through investigation of prominent national print and broadcast media, coupled with interviews with leading gay rights activists who worked to shape coverage of the debate, this project aims to 1) investigate the changes in media coverage over this time period, including news framing, visuals and sourcing patterns; and 2) examine how the aims and challenges of activists have shifted during this time frame—their goals, their definitional strategies, and the overall impact of media coverage on the movement. This multi-method approach investigates not only how major news media outlets have covered the controversial issue, but also how activist message-producers struggled to promote their preferred meanings, definitions and images in the news media.

Motivation for the Study by Leigh Moscowitz
This new phase of the research project is a continuation of my dissertation research on the issue of same-sex marriage in the press. I think the same-sex marriage issue is a defining issue of our time. Marriage has always, historically, been this line in the sand that defines in many ways whom we allow in and whom we cast out of our national institutions.

I became really fascinated in this topic while in graduate school because I have always been interested in how “controversial” issues come to the forefront of the mainstream media, and how marginalized communities are represented in the news. It was surrounding the 2004 presidential election that we began to see unprecedented media attention surrounding the gay marriage issue (tied to activity in Massachusetts, California and Vermont). I was drawn to the topic because here is essentially a group that has been historically marginalized and cast as “anti-family values” and “anti-marriage.”

The onslaught on media attention brought about new images of gay and lesbian life appearing in the mainstream news media: in television news stories and in news magazines and leading national newspaper, images of, for example, a lesbian couple under a flowered canopy, saying their vows, or of a gay male couple burping their newborn son. The issue has even become more interesting with the recent activity in California, Maine, and Washington, D.C. I am interested to see the ways in which the framing of the issue has changed, and to return to re-interview those gays rights activists I spoke with nearly five years ago to determine how their goals, strategies, and stories have evolved. What will emerge is a critical, longitudinal study that investigates changes in activist discourses and news framing of one the most contentious social issues in the last decade.

Newsroom: AEJMC Names 2010 Scholars

The AEJMC Scholars Program awards $2,500 research and teaching grants to up to four AEJMC teams to encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing partial funding for research or teaching projects. Proposals selected for funding are matched with a recognized scholar to serve as a mentor throughout the project.

But a new study by an Emerson College researcher, published in the current (Autumn 2009) issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, shows that bloggers do little original reporting and that political blogs rely heavily on the mainstream media for their information.

“Nearly half of the hypertext links – which serve the roughly the same purpose as attribution in a newspaper story – in political blogs direct the reader to mainstream media stories. Only 15 percent take readers to ‘primary source’ material such as government documents or candidates’ public statements,” said Mark Leccese, the author of the study and assistant professor in the Journalism Department of Emerson College in Boston.

The study examined more than 2,000 hypertext links in six top independent political blogs – three liberal and three conservative – over seven consecutive days in January 2008 and placed each link into one of four categories: links to mainstream media, links to other blogs, links to other pages on the same Web site, and links to primary source material.

“I worked as a political reporter for newspapers for more than 20 years, so when political blogs became a phenomenon, I wanted to try to understand the similarities and differences in how bloggers and mainstream media reporters go about their work,” Leccese said. “Reporters build their stories from primary source material, so I designed a study to determine whether political bloggers do the same. They don’t.”

Readership of blogs has exploded in less than a decade. A Pew Internet & American Life survey in 2008 found that a quarter of American adults read blogs and that the second most popular topic for blogs – after “personal” – is politics. In a 2007 poll, 55 percent of Americans agreed blogs are “important to the future of American journalism.”

Almost half of the hypertext links in the six blogs studied – Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Talking Points Memo, Michelle Malkin, InstaPundit and Power Line – took readers to Web sites run by media organizations that employ salaried staff reporters.

“The standard format of a blog post is a link to a mainstream media story with comment and opinion added by the blogger,” Leccese said. “In that way, political blogs are like a newspaper comprised of only op-ed pages featuring opinion columnists who gather most of their information from secondary sources.”

About a quarter of the hypertext links took readers to other blogs. “This is the famous and now well-documented ‘echo chamber’ effect,” Leccese said. “This suggests that for political bloggers, opinion reinforcement is more important than gathering and disseminating information.”

One survey found that a third of bloggers consider themselves journalists. But this study argues that while bloggers may be considered journalists in the narrowest definition of the word—those who keep a journal or whose writing is featured regularly in a mass medium—they do not fit more common and widely accepted definition of journalists: workers in the mass media who seek out facts largely from primary sources and present those facts to media consumers.

CONTACT: Mark Leccese, assistant professor, Journalism Department, Emerson College, 617-824-3857, Mark_Leccese@emerson.edu.

• Download Online Information Sources of Political Blogs by Mark Leccese, Emerson College.
• More from Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
• More 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.

Dr. Serena Carpenter, an assistant professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, examined over a six-month period 664 online media job postings on JournalismJobs.com to gauge whether online news media employers prefer employees with specific skill sets or with knowledge spanning several topics.

Traditional news media were still most interested in hiring new employees with “nontechnical routine expertise,” such as solid writing skills, working under deadline, editing, teamwork and communication skills, and Associated Press Style. About equally, however, they also were seeking employees with “technical routine expertise,” such as content posting and management, image editing, blogging, video editing, and social media knowledge.

Nontraditional online news media were as interested in nontechnical routine expertise as traditional news media, but less interested in routine technical expertise (perhaps because they assumed new employees already had such skills or that they could be easily taught). Instead, nontraditional online news media were significantly more interested in hiring employees with adaptive expertise, such as knowledge outside journalism/mass communication, creativity, independent and critical thinking, leadership, and problem-solving abilities.

Regardless of their preferences, the job postings for traditional and nontraditional online news sources expressed interest in employees with some expertise in both areas, suggesting that teaching specific and broad knowledge areas should each have a place in the journalism and mass communication curriculum.

The study appears in the Autumn 2009 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.

CONTACT: Serena Carpenter, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University, Serena.Carpenter [at] asu.edu.

• Download An Application of the Theory of Expertise: Teaching Broad and Skill Knowledge Areas to Prepare Journalists for Change, by Serena Carpenter, Arizona State University.
• More from Journalism and Mass Communication Educator
• More 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.