Future of Online News: Winners & Losers

A winter 2010 Newspaper Research Journal study found that newspapers and news Web sites generally cover the same topics but newspapers offer greater breadth and depth than their online counterparts. Yet online news was unmatched in its scope of international coverage and its strong focus on popular issues, analysis and opinion.

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 Future of Communication: Theory and Methodology?

By Dietram A. Scheufele, UW-Madisonb

COMMUNICATION THEORY & METHODOLOGY – Communication as a discipline has come to a crossroads. The “mass” in mass communication has morphed into different publics that generate, exchange, and use content in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. And these changes in how content is produced and communicated are paralleled by much more far-reaching shifts in how some cohorts in society interpret traditional notions of privacy, objectivity, and source credibility. And so far, our discipline has not done a very good job at offering answers to what have become increasingly pressing questions in various societal debates. How do social media change how we interact with one another? How does information get disseminated in a fragmented multi-channel media environment? And what does the future of (mass) communication look like?

The tricky part, of course, is that many of the answers to these questions transcend the boundaries of our discipline. This is particularly challenging for a young field, such as communication, that continues to struggle with its identity and its desire to compete on an even playing field with much larger disciplines, such as psychology and political science. And if we are not careful, we may follow these disciplines down some dead ends. A good example is the debate surrounding Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s proposal in October 2009 to prohibit the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.” Coburn, of course, used the label “political science” but targeted social science much more broadly. And his comments rekindled an old debate among political scientists about incremental disciplinary research versus big questions. Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein summarized this intra-disciplinary dilemma best: “Graduate students discussing their field … often speak in terms of ‘an interesting puzzle,’ a small intellectual conundrum… that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” Read more

Foursquare, journalism, and a sense of place

By Jeremy Littau*

I have a confession to make. I live a secret life. By day you know me as the mild-mannered professor of journalism, helping guide young ones in the formation of their journalistic skills. But I have an alter ego.

You see, I am the mayor of Coppee Hall.

For the uninitiated, I’m talking about Foursquare, a mobile Web application that uses location-based systems to let you “check in” where you are using an application on your iPhone or similar smartphone device. If I had to compare it to something you already might know and use, it’s similar to Twitter except that rather than tweeting about what’s in your mind or what you are doing, it’s simply a status message about where you are.

My goal for this post is to sketch out some ideas in hopes that you’ll add yours at the end of it. I’ve been fooling around with Foursquare the past couple weeks after Mashable recently noted it was the social media offering worth watching in 2010. After using it for a while, I am seeing some of the huge potential it offers both fans of social media and journalists. And I see a lot of potential for it in terms of journalism education, as it offers a new way to tell stories and add to the record.

In fact, the designers have made it such that your check-ins via the Foursquare app can be linked to other social media you already use, such as Facebook or Twitter. When you check in, the application generates a boilerplate status message that tells people where you’re at. On Facebook, it adds a little Google map so you can see the location visually.

Checking in is about as easy as could be. When I load the Foursquare app on my iPhone, the applications triangulates my approximate location via cell phone towers and then suggests places to check in that are nearby. When I got to work today, for example, it suggested the University, several buildings on campus, and a bunch of local businesses.

To check in, you simply select one of the locations, press a button, and it’s recorded. My check-ins can be seen by friends of mine I am linked to (when you sign up, it gives you the option of adding friends similar to Facebook by searching e-mail addresses, Twitter friends, or Facebook friends). If I link it to my other social media accounts, that check-in will be viewable there as well.

People ask me (OK, well, my wife asks me) why in the world a service like this would be useful. And on the surface it seems kind of silly. Nobody really cares where I am at the moment, and there doesn’t seem to be anything useful about this kind of thing to folks who cannot look beyond what they see in front of them (i.e. an “I’m at Coppee Hall” status message on Facebook).

Truthfully, the designers probably saw the same thing in terms of burnout potential, which is why they created badges. You earn these things by doing something, or sometimes a lot of something. The first badge you earn is for your first check-in. To date I’ve earned other badges for 10 check-ins at different venues, 30-check-in updates in a month, and one for being at a place three times in one week. You can earn a “Gym Rat” badge for going to work out a lot or other less charitably-named badges for going to your local watering hole a bit too often.

The badges aren’t worth anything per se, but they tap into that need to collect things that my generation tends to have, something my colleague Bob Britten explained so well on his blog. This is how my generation is wired to play games, so the badges have some type of intrinsic value. And they also are a type of status symbol; wouldn’t it feel good to be known via your badges as someone who works out a lot?

The mayorships are part of that as well. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was mayor of Coppee Hall, the building where I work. You earn this title by checking in at a location more times than anyone else in the past two months (provided you have a photo uploaded to your profile). Right now I’m mayor of three locations, including my local CVS pharmacy. Yup, I’m a big shot.

Being mayor is one of the more fun things about Foursquare, and people do guard the title with their life. My friend Jen who was a fellow grad student at MU got into an interesting conversation with a few of us on Facebook concerning Foursquare and said she is obsessive about her mayorships. Using the application’s “Shout” feature, she even sends out a blast to her constituents telling them hello every time she checks in to her favorite fiefdom (the local library), and that message gets posted on the venue page and via Twitter (if anyone’s listening).

A Foursquare check-in has about the same kind of value or power as an individual tweet, which is to say very little. As with most things that are forward-thinking about social media, the power is not in the individual message but the sum of messages in aggregate. So beyond being mayor and earning badges, what is Foursquare good for? There are two big things that stand out to me: business potential and journalism potential.

The business one, we’re starting to see that more. Businesses are seeing the value of being listed. Every time I check in at a venue I am in a sense advertising their existence to my social network; that’s credibility and advertising you can’t buy. So good businesses figure out ways to reward people by offering discounts for check-ins or free food for their mayor. There’s a good deal of logic here. More check-ins means more social advertising.

But the business end also has some cool other features. When I check in to some place, I can add a tip (pictured) about the location. At a restaurant, I added a tip about a particular dish I like. At work, I put on there to be ready to walk up hill, which Lehigh U folks obviously know but a visitor might not. It’s a really cool way to socially share local knowledge about a place, but all that knowledge is user-driven to the degree that people using Foursquare make use of it.

While you can see these tips on the venue’s page, you also can surf for local tips aggregated regardless of venue based on your current location. So when I load the app and my location gets triangulated, I can click on the tips menu at the bottom and it will aggregate tips for any place near me, regardless of location. It’s a really useful feature if I was, for example, in a random place and looking for a new place to eat that I hadn’t tried before.

I say it all the time, but one of the great things about media is serendipity, the process of coming across things you wouldn’t expect to find. Aggregated tips based on where we are is serendipity at work, allowing me to explore my neighborhood or current location in more interesting ways.

OK, so it’s good for business, and good for those of us who want to discover things in our city or neighborhood that we don’t know about. By itself, that is super useful because it acts as a type of location-based wiki where users add to the record about a place and help us define that space with a little more context. This is what I mean by Foursquare, like Twitter before it, being more than the sum of an individual check-in. Sure, nobody cares that I’m at CVS, but there is value in me adding tips that the lines seem especially long during certain times of the day.

That’s where the journalist’s role comes in. Foursquare is a platform full of journalistic potential because adding information to the record is what we do. Did a local business fail a health inspection recently? Right now we put that in the newspaper, which people are reading less, or on a Web site, where people don’t know how to find it among mountains of information. There is value in journalists adding news and verified information to the record (including links for more information) that would enhance a person’s knowledge and ability to experience (or avoid) a place.

So journalists can add tips, but they can also be part of projects mapping out the community in general. One of the nice things about Foursquare is that you can add venues if the one you’re at isn’t on the check-in screen. The app makes use of Google maps and you can type in what you’re searching for to get its suggestions, but sometimes you just have to enter the name and address of the business. This would be a wonderful role for the journalist, to help map out our communities and provide some of those tips and details along the way that help add to the narrative. Everything on Foursquare is, in the end, driven by its users.

At its best, news provides us with a sense of place about our surroundings by telling us things about the places we live that we might otherwise might not know about. For someone like me who is living in a new home and city, Foursquare has been an interesting way to explore my own neighborhood. When I am at home I can see all the businesses and places I didn’t know about because it doesn’t fall along my usual driving or walking patterns. When there is information that is value-added by professional journalists or citizen journalists, I get to know my community better.

I am working on ways to get something Foursquare-like into the classroom, maybe not this term but next fall. If we were to treat the app as a wiki platform, my simple idea would be to award points for value-added information. The goal would be to map different sections of our community over the semester, adding as much detail and information as possible.

There is value in this stuff. It might not win us a Pulitzer, but it would add to the larger community narrative and help us better understand our surroundings amidst a busy, busy world. In the end, that’s a big part of the job.

How do you see yourself using Foursquare in a journalistic fashion?

*This article first appeared on the author’s website at http://www.jlittau.net/, and was re-posted with the author’s permission.

Jeremy Littau has almost 10 years of experience in journalism after working at newspapers of different sizes, specializing in editing and writing both in print and online. He got his start at the Daily Democrat in Woodland, CA, and did the typical “move up the ladder” part of his career, landing at the Los Angeles Daily News in 2000. He spent four years at the Daily News before returning to school at Missouri. He earned his M.A. in journalism from Missouri in 2007 and his PhD in journalism from Missouri in 2009.

Jeremy has extensive experience researching new media trends in journalism and is the author of several publications on the subject, specializing in multiplatform storytelling that makes use of audience conversation in the news process. He is available for research and training seminars both within the academic environment as well as within newsrooms.

Women in the Newsroom: Burned Out and Fed Up

A summer 2009 Newspaper Research Journal study reported that 62 percent of women working in newspaper newsrooms have some intention of leaving journalism, citing exhaustion and cynicism, two components that can lead to burnout. Of women 27 and younger, more than 74 percent answered “yes” or “don’t know” to the intention-to-leave question.

The study’s researcher Scott Reinardy of the University of Kansas will lead a LIVE online chat Thursday, January 21 at 12pm EST, where he’ll discuss these results with women still working in journalism and some who have left.

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

Meet the Panelists

Sara Bondioli is a production/copy editor at Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, where she designs pages and edits copy for the print edition as well as helps to refresh and maintain RollCall.com. Previously, Sara worked as a designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the news, features and sports departments. She graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in news-editorial journalism and political science. Sara currently lives near Washington, D.C., and enjoys seeing the Capitol each day on her way to the office.

Carrie Brown began working as an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Memphis in the fall of 2008, teaching media writing and mass communication theory. Her dissertation research involves an in-depth case study of a metropolitan daily newspaper’s efforts to grapple with changes to its newsroom structure, culture, and daily routines. Brown received her MA in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Brown has worked as a daily newspaper reporter and editor, and also managed a training program for the Committee of Concerned Journalists for three years.

Kelly Davenport is a former copy editor and current graduate student, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in fiction at the University of Idaho. She worked for five years at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., where she also designed pages, blogged and slotted copy. While in Tacoma, she and four other copy editors were recognized as the best headline writers in the country in 2005 by the American Copy Editors Society. Previously, she worked as an editing intern at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. At the University of Idaho, she teaches three sections of freshman composition. Her work was nominated in 2009 for the Associated Writing Program’s Intro Journals Project in fiction. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism.

Rachel George has been covering high school sports for the StarNews in Wilmington, N.C. since she graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 2006. In her time with the StarNews, she has seen the newspaper industry change. She has learned how to edit audio and video as well as learning HTML code to maintain 41 Web pages. She also hosts a successful video show and has the StarNews’ top-read blog. In addition to covering games and writing features, she has produced several award-winning investigative and enterprise projects.

Marie Hardin, associate professor of journalism at Penn State University, is associate director of its John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. She teaches journalism and classes that focus on sports and society at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research concentrates on diversity, ethics and professional practices in mediated sports. Her work has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Sociology of Sport Journal, Journal of Sports Management, among others. Recent research has focused on social attitudes and values of sports journalists and bloggers and on the experiences and career paths of women in sports journalism. Hardin received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Georgia. Before completing her Ph.D., she worked as a newspaper reporter and editor; she has also worked as a freelance magazine writer.

Laura Lane received a BS in Journalism in 1983 from Butler University. For the past 25 years, she’s been a newspaper reporter at the Herald-Times in Bloomington. She covers criminal justice, five rural counties and all that goes on in them and also writes a column each week about people and their cars called “My Favorite Ride.” Like most print journalists these days, she also takes pictures and shoots video. Lane teaches an editing/news reporting class at Indiana University’s Ernie Pyle School of Journalism, and has won dozens of state and national writing awards.

Reni Winter is a laid-off journalist, a casualty of the Gannett Corp.’s 10 percent staff reduction in December 2009. Her position as night editor at the Journal & Courier was eliminated, and at that moment her 25-year journalism career ended. During her career she amassed numerous awards for news and feature writing as well as diversity and community involvement. She has been a staff writer/columnist and editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Picayune Item and Biloxi Sun-Herald in Mississippi and most recently the Journal & Courier in Lafayette, Indiana. Winter is now working as a bilingual marketing & sales assistant at a trucking insurance company. She continues to write, and is collaborating on a children’s book. She also is the owner/grower of Winterhaven Wildflowers, a native plant and butterfly preserve in Central Indiana and is very active in the restoration of the northern habitat of the monarch butterfly.

Meet the Moderator & Author of Female Journalists More Likely To Leave Newspapers

Scott Reinardy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. He was a reporter and editor for 18 years at five different daily newspapers.

Reinardy earned his doctorate from the University of Missouri, and was a city editor at MU’s laboratory newspaper, The Columbia Missourian.

Reinardy’s primary research interests include the examination of stress and burnout of journalists, organizational change in newspaper newsrooms, newsroom layoff survivors, ethical development of journalists, sports journalism, and experiential education of young journalists. His research has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Atlantic Journal of Communication, The Journal of Law & Education, Journal of Sports Media, among others. Reinardy’s work has been presented at several national and international conferences, including the Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Sports Editors, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, International Communication Association, American Journalism Historians Association, and Broadcast Education Association.

Reinardy joined the KU faculty in August 2008. Prior to KU he taught at Ball State University for three years.

He is also the co-author of “The Essentials of Sports Reporting and Writing,” Routledge, 2009.

About NRJ
Newspaper Research Journal is a refereed journal published quarterly that reaches more than 1,000 journalism students, scholars and media professionals in the United States and 20 countries. NRJ comprehensively answers questions about U.S. newspaper performance and related topics of interest. Significant themes of research range from balance and fairness to the use of computer analysis in newspaper reporting. NRJ is unique because it provides a forum for comprehensive, current research and discussion on print journalism, serving as a bridge between newspaper professionals and scholars. Visit the journal’s Web site at http://www.newspaperresearchjournal.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.

The New Poverty: Bright Spots in an Otherwise Dim Story

From the series: Returning to the Digital Newsroom
A special report by Michael Bugeja

If Tuesday’s post was dim, discussing bleak statistics about the scope of what some are calling, “The Second Depression,” this one contains two brighter spots, interviews with the executive director of a young woman’s resource center and with a young woman entrepreneur who could have fallen into the hopeless syndrome of depression due to joblessness, but instead relied on a historic Iowa value: neighborhood (but with a digital twist).

Heather Soener heads the Young Women’s Resource Center, 705 E. 2nd Street, Des Moines, which helps girls and young women from every demographic.

You can check out the long list of programs and services here.

In our interview, Soener told me that the center does “a lot of prevention programming,” especially for young girls reaching the fifth grade. One of the things impacting their lives and normal development is unemployment. “Families are under great pressure with layoffs now.”

The center also focuses on a Latina group of girls, emphasizing their culture and roots and how some values might differ in the community. (The Latino/a Iowa cultures share a strong work ethic.) In both groups, the specter of unemployment echoes. “You hear things like, ‘My mom worked there for seven years, and now she has been laid off.’” Read more

Carol Pardun becomes President, Plans “lively” future for AEJMC

October 1, 2009 — Dr. Carol J. Pardun succeeds Barbara Hines, Howard, as the 91st* President of AEJMC.

Pardun is the director of the University of South Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Prior to her appointment at USC, Pardun was the director of the School of Journalism at Middle Tennessee State University from August 2005 through July 2008. She has held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997-2005) and Kansas State University (1992-97).

Pardun sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journalism and Communication Monographs, Journal of Media & Religion, Simile, Mass Communication & Society, and Journal of Advertising. She was the co-principal investigator with Jane Brown (UNC-Chapel Hill) from 2001-06 for a $2.6 million grant investigating the impact of the media on adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behavior funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Pardun’s research has been published in the Journal of Early Adolescent Research, Pediatrics, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Advertising Research, Public Relations Review, and elsewhere. Her current research investigates the prevalence of co-existing messages of nutrition and physical activity in entertainment programming, and advertising aimed at young elementary school-aged children. Her new book, Advertising and Society: Controversies and Consequences, is published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Pardun holds a PhD from the University of Georgia in mass communications, an MA from Wheaton (IL) College Graduate School in communications, and a BA in English Literature from Wheaton College.

CONTACT: University of South Carolina, Office: (803) 777-3244 E-mail: pardunc@mailbox.sc.edu

*Historical records indicate no sitting president or convention from 1918-20. Additionally, several presidents served two consecutive terms, including: Merle Thorpe, Kansas, 1914-16; Ralph L. Crossman, Colorado, 1932-34; Charles L. Allen, Northwestern, 1939-41; Douglas W. Miller, Syracuse, 1942-44; and Frederic E. Merwin, Rutgers, 1944-46, making Pardun the 91st person elected to lead AEJMC.

The Future of AEJMC

To help kick off the new year, we sat down with Carol and asked her to share some of her thoughts and plans for AEJMC during her term as president. Read more

Four Authors/Five Books: A Reading Assignment for Media Educators and Scholars

by Cindy Royal, Assistant Professor,
Texas State University in San Marcos

The AEJMC conference in Boston offered many of the benefits I always enjoy and appreciate at the annual gathering: seeing old friends, networking with colleagues, meeting people with whom I have been communicating online and learning about research and teaching trends. But, the conference took a different tone this outing, as there was much discussion (both online and offline, in the sessions and in the hallways) of journalism professors being out of touch with the realities of online media and the digital economy (see Guy Berger’s MediaShift post “Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change”). Criticisms included: questions and issues being addressed in sessions were outdated; research topics were tedious and mired in minutia; some social media applications, like Twitter, were viewed with disdain and condescension; and a general lack of understanding of the challenges and needs of the industries we support. As a profession, we have many big questions to answer, at such a critical time, that it has to be our responsibility as educators to assist in developing innovative solutions and drive the conversation.

It is exceedingly important that journalism as an educational and scholarly discipline embraces the new media environment and helps lead our graduates to enter their chosen fields with a spirit of innovation and the ability to influence direction. We often get wrapped up in the skills we teach. Should students learn HTML, video editing, Flash? Should they use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube?

Perhaps first, we should take a step back and develop an understanding and appreciation of the new environment: what makes these skills relevant, how do these tools and platforms affect the nature of storytelling and what options do we have for business models that embrace and value these features? The digital economy differs significantly from that of legacy media. In talking to conference attendees about this topic, I realized that there were several authors that I had been exposed to over the past few years that have significantly influenced my understanding of the current environment. I now think in terms of concepts like media as a conversation rather than a lecture, marketing to the “long tail” rather than masses, business models that include a “free” component, the importance of motivating a fan/user base to participate and providing a powerful user experience, the realities of a copyright system that potentially limit users’ ability to fully capitalize on those experiences and a targeted ad model that emphasizes keywords and context.

So, here are my recommendations for the five books that every media professor should read (along with online resources, since we are, after all, talking about the digital economy). Read more

Rethinking Media Writing

By Tricia Farwell
Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University

Back in the dark ages, during my undergraduate education, there were two choices for me as a student (or at least that was how I saw things). Option one was to be on the print side of the world. Option two was to be on the broadcast side. In my mind, the two were never to meet. The broadcast students scrambled into their editing bays and studios; they played with pictures and sound. In my mind, print reigned supreme. We had words to craft into wonderful tapestries. We strutted into the computer labs, knowing that what we had to say was important.

A few courses into the program I experienced a crisis of epic proportions…I realized I didn’t like most of what was involved in being a journalist. Thanks to one wonderfully astute advisor, I was counseled to take public relations courses. I was lucky. I found a happily ever after early. Some of my friends weren’t as lucky and had to take “extra” courses when they found they didn’t like what they originally intended to pursue.

Fast forward a few years (ok, maybe a decade or two) and I find myself in a place I never expected to be: part of the curriculum committee discussing a course that, in my opinion, might help students to make slightly more informed choices. That course is our media writing course. In its current incarnation, the class is designed to be an overview of various types of writing that students of the mass media might encounter. As you can see by the sample syllabus, we try to spend a few sessions on each writing area. It’s a sampler platter, for sure, but one that may be more beneficial than harmful. Read more

Empowering professors with today’s skills

*We asked [everyone] to tell us in a creative way what they thought the future of journalism and mass communication might look like. We received 17 innovative submissions ranging from 140-character tweets to unpublished book chapters to graphic designs and even poetry.

The following entry was selected as one of the top three finalists, and after a nation-wide vote, placed third overall:

Empowering professors with today’s skills

by Amy Zerba
Ph.D. candidate

Want to know how online editors determine story play?

How art directors or journalists think about multiplatform audiences?

Or how journalists or media relations specialists collaborate with citizen journalists, globally?

If your first thought was, “ooohh, research questions” and you teach journalism and/or mass communication courses, that’s a problem. For journalism and communication programs to stay current and keep up with the changing industry, it’s not always about research — often our first thought. It’s about truly understanding how your field – be it journalism, public relations or advertising — has changed today, and seeing it firsthand, without your research goggles.

My campaign for professors is called “just ask” because that’s all it takes to return to or visit a newsroom, agency or company for a day, a week, a month, or even a semester, to witness decision-making questions firsthand. With a simple phone call or email, professors can “just ask” if they can shadow for a certain amount of time. It’s not a class field trip. Just you. The response on the other end will undoubtedly be a “yes.” Skeptical? Just try it.

Forget research for the time being. Forget the pride you have from your days working in the field. It’s about staying relevant. Is what you teach truly relevant when it comes to practicing your craft today? If you’re not sure, go and observe. And if you are certain it is, go and verify that it is. Second, your time shadowing or even working in a newsroom, agency or company will benefit students. You will be re-inspired, and it will reflect in how and what you teach, and down the road, what you and your colleagues may research.

It’s not about getting funded to do this or getting paid time off to go (that’s not to say departments should not offer funding). It’s about you carving out time to be in your field again, and not for research purposes. You are making the effort to improve yourself, your skills and the way we teach journalism and mass communication today. Read more

Singer takes a ‘Bird’s-eye View’ of journalism’s future

Journalism and mass communication educators from across the globe will gather in Boston to share tips on how to survive and thrive in today’s evolving world. To kick off our summer convention, AEJMC asked [everyone] to imagine what the future of journalism and mass communication might look like.

17 innovative submissions were entered overall, ranging from 140-character tweets to unpublished book chapters to graphic designs and even poetry. 12 judges from advertising, education, new media and other areas, narrowed the entries down to three. And after a membership-wide vote, Jane Singer, University of Central Lancashire and University of Iowa, was selected as the winner for her entry, “Bird’s-Eye View.”

Singer wins complementary registration to the 2009 AEJMC Boston convention and will work with editors to produce her article with United Press International.

Jane B. Singer is the Johnston Press Chair in Digital Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire and an associate professor in the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her 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.

Bird’s-eye View

by Jane B. Singer
Associate Professor

Journalism will survive because it fills an important social need. But the shape of the industry and the jobs of industry workers obviously already are changing dramatically, and that change will continue. Here is one blue-sky scenario of how the not-too-distant future might look for our graduates.

THE JOURNALIST: For full-time employees, career progression is from entry-level work primarily focused on maintaining the free version of the website; through a newsroom apprenticeship, potentially in combination with an advanced university degree, to develop and refine skills of investigation, analysis, comment and/or management; to a senior role in those (or other emerging) areas, with primary focus on maintaining and enhancing the fee-based legacy and online products – the “value added” components.

THE PLATFORM: The website houses all content. Basic information, including routine coverage (local and wire), is free and continually updated; it is supplemented by user contributions of various types and in various forms. Original niche content and labor-intensive information (results of investigative reporting, multimedia packages, databases, etc.), are available online for those who pay for them in one way or another; newly developed products (for instance, unique content delivered to mobile phones) also may be available only to fee-paying users.

Advertising continues to generate revenue but makes a lesser overall contribution than in the past. In general, it contributes toward maintenance of the basic, free online product while users underwrite a greater share of the cost of the more expensive – but also unique and more valuable – journalistic material. Savvy companies can be profitable, but with much smaller margins than in the recent past.

The legacy print product likely decreases in both frequency and volume but increases in cost, with an emphasis on quality, primarily from depth of coverage and commentary; in essence, it becomes a local “news and views” magazine, with a smaller circulation than in the past. It also carries advertising. The legacy television/radio news product ceases to exist apart from the internet, which is accessible on a variety of non-computer platforms; all “broadcast” content is carried online, some for free and some for a fee; it too has some advertising support.

… And PUBLIC RELATIONS: The media organization’s website also houses press releases, clearly labeled but not re-edited by journalists. Public relations practitioners gain direct access to, and interaction with, readers.

Going even further out on a limb, I offer some speculative details on the following… Read more

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