Dec. 13 call issued for Spring SE Meeting
Site-building and event-planning are underway for the 2011 Southeast Colloquium for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication March 17-19 in Columbia, S.C.
The call for panel proposals and papers has been posted at event’s home page at the University of South Carolina (http://www.jour.sc.edu/sec2011/); the call for papers is also downloadable as a PDF file here.
The Newspaper Division “paper chair” for the event is Doug Fisher. Contact info for Doug and the other participating divisions is at the event site above.
Still the Newspaper Division?
Here are the links to this summer’s discussion of the Newspaper Division’s name, both in comments on Bill Cassidy’s call for discussion and the e-mail listserv conversation on the same topic — discussion from July and continuing discussion post-conference in August.
To add anything to the blog comments, Register, login, then click the blog’s title and follow this link back to the original discussion.
Its Speak Your Mind box is at the end of the earlier comments, or click a blue “Reply” tag to respond to a specific comment.
Additional notes from Bill appear in the Summer 2010 LeadTime. Links to the 2008 e-mail discussion of the same subject are at the end of the comment list.
For the stay-at-homes and back-at-homes
updated Aug. 9 and 11
This is a page-in-progress of links related to the AEJMC 2010 convention in Denver…
Here’s the Twitter hashtag link for the convention, where there was a whole lot of Tweeting going on…:
https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23AEJMC10
And, more specifically related to newspapers, here’s J-Lab’s video of the “Networked Journalism” luncheon:
“Five news organizations around the country are participating in a yearlong pilot project, funded by J-Lab, to see if they can collaborate with at least five hyperlocal sites in each of their communities. They are the Seattle Times, Charlotte Observer, MiamiHerald, Asheville Citizen-Times and TucsonCitizen.com. “
If the embedded video player doesn’t work for you — it may have to load for 15 seconds or more — one or more of these links will get you to the information…
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8755484
Conference News Site
Aug. 9 update
The address looks similar to the one for this blog, but http://aejmcnews.net is a news site for proceedings at the conference, staffed by students at four Colorado universities.
Newspaper division readers may be most interested in this item about a Friday panel, written by Amanda Keller, a Colorado State senior…
Strong local news coverage & community connections keep small papers healthy.
(The text-formatting problems mentioned in the original version of this post have been fixed.)
Aug. 11 update
Vin Crosbie, whose blog post about AEJMC and research I linked to last week, has an Aug. 8 follow-up ‘Regarding Academic Research and Fatuous Reporting About Trouble Media Industries’.
Meanwhile, the discussion of his original Aug. 2 post now includes additional comments from folks with significant experience in the newspaper and online newspaper industries.
Any more to share with Newspaper Division members? Add a comment here or send me e-mail and I’ll add it to the blog.
Virtual Denver: Twin presentation of twin surveys
For a hint of virtual convention-going, Ying Roselyn Du of Hong Kong Baptist University and Ryan Thornburg of UNC at Chapel Hill already have their Newspaper Division Denver presentation online, using Scribd.com for the paper and Slideshare.net for the presentation on “The gap between online journalism education and practice: The twin surveys.”
Abstract: The gap between journalism education and journalism practice has long been the focus of debates in the field. Amid the emergence of online journalism in the 1990s, the profession’s criticism of journalism education has continued unabated. It is ever important to revisit the old “gap” issue in this new context. This study attempts to examine the discordance between education and practice by comparing online journalism professionals and educators’ perceptions of key skills, concepts, and duties for online journalism. Findings of the twin surveys suggest that differences do exist in the online context.
- Conference paper via Scribd
- Slideshare presentation (including audio)
For the benefit of those of us who are not in Denver, or just for the archives, feel free to add links to other presentations as comments on this post. Also, #aejmc10 is the Twitter “hashtag” participants are using to flag their items from the convention.
Needed: Industrial-Weight Academic Research?
Member of a newspaper family, online media consultant and Syracuse faculty member Vin Crosbie isn’t at AEJMC’s Denver conference this week for a variety of reasons…
Those who are filling in time at the convention browsing the Web will find food for thought in his item, The Media Academic Research Treadmill at Digital Deliverance, recalling newspaper industry exec Earl Wilkinson‘s visits to AEJMC six or seven years ago.
Vin’s item has drawn a few interesting comments on the relative merits of “industry research” and “academic research.”
Further food for thought: I remember posting some of Wilkinson’s materials back then on the original AEJMC Newspaper Division site, where they’re still available under the heading “Research Material”:
http://aejmc.net/newspaper/resources.html
The INMA list of AEJMC research Wilkinson DID find promising is no longer on the INMA.org site at the address we linked to back then, but I did find a copy by using the Archive.org Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030920053327/http://www.inma.org/academicpapers.cfm
From the Newspaper Division’s own Web archives, here are the 2003 documents Wilkinson shared with us:
- Newspapers and Academic Research INMA letter to the Newspaper Division head, Clyde Bentley.
- Results of a research-interests survey of newspaper industry executives (17 pages including 139 comments)
That same year, the Newspaper Division surveyed its members on the question of research interests. Here are quantitative results and Full-text answers
Maybe it’s time for a fresh try at that member survey… It might help with the “What should we call the division?” discussion that has been going on for the past month.
Personal disclosure: My own newspaper-related research is mostly historical, which I have to admit doesn’t do “the industry” much good, except by pointing out that innovation coupled with ethical lapses has sometimes looked good for business, but failed in the long run.
Footnote: For more on current research, check out that same Clyde Bentley’s posts at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, a regular research roundup.
The latest bad news
From USC Annenberg via Editor & Publisher:
Study: Newspapers Sink Below Internet and TV as Information Sources
“Newspapers continue to be seen as less important at their primary job — being sources of information – according to the latest edition of the nine-year-old Digital Future Project from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.
“The study found that just 56% Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them, down from 60% in 2008 — and below the Internet (78%) and television (68%).
“And while newspapers also regard themselves as being in the entertainment business, just 29% of users consider them as important sources of entertainment, down from 32% two years ago, and last among principal media.”
Gannett Tries Pay Walls at Three Papers
Eagle-eyed Doug Fisher at South Carolina spied “a low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper” announcing the coming of pay-per-view to Gannett’s Greenville News, one of three papers the chain is taking to pay-per-view on the Web. See his commentary.
Pay Walls Debut at Three Gannett Papers Testing ‘Journalism as a Service’ is the headline on Poynter Online’s NewsPay column by Bill Mitchell.
Included are The Tallahassee Democrat, The Greenville S.C. News and The St. George, Utah Spectrum.
Mitchell notes that Gannett called this "a small-scale test."
Gannett publishes 82 daily U.S. newspapers, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper, and more than 600 magazines and other non-dailies including USA WEEKEND. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in 19 U.S. markets.–Corp.HQ
At http://tallahassee.com, for an example of the pay system, the Web front page headlines and summaries are still visible, but clicking through to read a full local story results in a table of pay rates.
Original Tallahassee.com stories require one of several subscription plans or a $2 day pass. Options include a $9.95 monthly Web-only subscription or various Web/Print combinations.
Still free are stories from USA Today and other sources woven into the site, such as those under the heading “From our news network” on the “Topic: Oil Spill” pages.
It probably goes without saying that the local business directories and ads are still free, too.
What’s a ‘newspaper’ when random Twitter feeds build the contents?
(This item was originally misleadingly headlined, “What’s a ‘newspaper,’ division?”
The Newspaper Division name-change discussion is elsewhere. )
So does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?
That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”
So today I “founded” two newspapers. All I had to do was login using my Twitter I.D. (“bobstep”) and type the feed names into a box.
Well, maybe I just “found,” not “founded,” the first one. I went through the Paper.li form to create it, but it may have been there already.
In both cases, the page is built of headlines and summaries from the Twitter feeds subscribed to by the owner of a feed — “AEJMC” for the first one, and “BobStep” for the second.
This may be important: Note that the contents of our “newspapers” aren’t items that the group or person named on top wrote — or even read; they are just the latest Twitterings from sources we thought might have something interesting to say once in a while. Perhaps we haven’t been watching closely enough to see that they really don’t. Nothing like running their stuff under your name to make you sit up and take notice.
Selections from the owners’ own posts are in a sidebar off to the right of those screen images, where the feed owner is called “curator” of the page.
Anyhow, if those are “newspapers” then the name "Newspaper Division" is broader than some of us thought!
Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.
More on this over on my personal blog.
The Future of News and the Internet, OECD version
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development offers a 98-page report on “the global newspaper market and its evolution, with a particular view on its economics, the development of online news, related opportunities and challenges and policy approaches.”
Some OECD countries already stepped in to financially help the newspaper industry, while others are debating whether government suppaidort can support a diverse and independent local press.
“Given that almost all OECD countries are currently reflecting on how to approach these issues, this study is designed to provide a platform for further exchange on immediate and longer-term policy development,” the report’s introduction says.
Information: OECD examines the Future of News and the Internet. Full text: “The Future of News and the Internet” (pdf).
Among the report’s observations:
- About 20 out of 30 OECD countries face declining newspaper readership, especially among younger people.
- The largest declines are in the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain.
- Elsewhere, country-by-country and title-by-title data “currently do not lend themselves to make the case for ‘the death of the newspaper,’ in particular if non-OECD countries.”
- “In terms of time spent, Internet users report a large increase in reading online newspapers, but most online readership is more ad hoc, irregular and sporadic than print newspaper readership used to be. The way news is consumed is also radically different on line.”
Newspapers ‘strange survival’ in Economist
“Newspapers have escaped cataclysm by becoming leaner and more focused” according to The Economist‘s Newspapers: The strange survival of ink, a story rich in European examples.
But even in the U.S., it says, “some companies are now worth ten times as much as in the spring of 2009, although they remain far from pre-recession heights.”
(See the article for some interesting details on McClatchy and Gannett, including a report that more Gannett papers using USA Today material.)
“The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed,” the article concludes, after discussing business strategies that involve iPads and smartphones, more local news and sports, etc. Emphasis added below:
“They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”
