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.
Summer LeadTime: Mountains Calling
The Summer issue of the LeadTime newsletter is ready for downloading at its tab atop this page or from the Newsletter archive on the division homepage.
Among its topics:
- Things to do in Denver in and out of the AEJMC Convention this August…
- a profile of the division’s Educator of the Year…
- convention panels…
- pre-convention sessions on teaching, research…
- the research paper presentation schedule…
- the chairman’s column…
- and editor Mike Grundmann’s first-person account of his challenging semester as a student media adviser at James Madison University.
Hampton U Prof Named Outstanding Teacher
An AEJMC Newspaper Division selection committee has named Rick Kenney of Hampton University the division’s 2010 winner of the Outstanding Teacher Award.
A former journalist with the Baltimore Evening Sun, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other papers, Kenney was named Scripps Howard Endowed Professor of Journalism at the Hampton, Va., university last year. He teaches media ethics and media law and directs the school’s Academy of Writing Excellence. He has won numerous awards for both his journalism and his teaching, and also has been an Ethics Fellow with the Poynter Institute since 2003.
Kenney, former executive news editor at the Evening Sun, holds a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Georgia and has taught at the University of Central Florida, Troy State University and Florida Southern College. He also directed a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern residency program for copy editing interns from 2002 to 2008, and wrote COPY! The first 50 years of the Dow Jones newspaper Fund.
Brian Carroll of Berry College, co-chair of the Newspaper Division’s teaching standards committee, thanked Kenney’s nominators, Rick Brunson, John Gogick, Melissa Patterson and Tim Lynch. Presentation of the award will be made at the business meeting of the Newspaper Division during the AEJMC National Convention Aug 4-7 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel in Denver.
Research lovers wanted for Denver affair
Write papers, judge papers; something for everyone.
From Chris Roberts and Jin Yang, research co-chairs:
The Newspaper Division needs more judges to handle the research competition for the Denver convention.
If you are a faculty member who is not submitting a paper to the Newspaper Division, please spare us a few hours of your time in April and agree to judge two or three or four papers. We’ll have papers assigned on April 2, and you have until May 1 to complete your labor of love. To help:
1. Send an e-mail to Chris Roberts at croberts@ua.edu.
2. Go to http://www.allacademic.com/one/aejmc/aejmc10/ and create an account, so we can add you as a judge.
If you have questions, call Chris at 205-348-8619 or contact Jin Yang at jinyang@memphis.edu.
Nearly desperately yours,
Chris Roberts and Jin Yang
For authors: Denver research-submission links:
Discuss the Newspaper Division’s Name
Ed.: HOW TO JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Register, login, then click the blog’s title to get back here. Read to the bottom to Speak Your Mind on Bill’s original message, or click a blue “Reply” tag to respond to a specific comment. The discussion will be open until September. The same topic on the division’s e-mail list is archived here. Additional notes from Bill appear in the Summer 2010 LeadTime. Links to the 2008 e-mail discussion appear at the end of the comment list.
by Bill Cassidy, division chair
I thought of beginning with some pithy little saying that would accurately describe the issue I want to address in this column. I could have written something like “It’s the elephant in the room,” or “We’ve been down this road before,” or maybe even some reference to “stirring up a hornet’s nest.” Well, it seems I’ve gone and done just that. But, here’s the bottom line: I strongly believe that we need to revisit the issue of changing our division’s name and bring the conversation to some kind of conclusion.
Indeed, we have been down this road before. In her Summer 2008 column, former division head Susan Keith stated “I believe we need a name that better embraces the full range of what our scholars study and what our industry does.” From there a spirited discussion about a possible name change ensued on the division’s listserv… Read more
Call for Nominations: Outstanding Educator Award
SE Colloquium, Denver 2010, in LeadTime
Dec.4 is the deadline for SouthEast Colloquium panel proposals and research papers, with the Newspaper Division among the participants.
The event will be March 11-13 at the UNC School of Journalism & Mass Communication in Chapel Hill.
For details, download the colorful fall edition of the division’s LeadTime newsletter from the AEJMC Newspaper Division Homepage, or go straight to the SE Colloquium 2010 page at UNC.
The new LeadTime also covers the 2009 Boston convention and previews next year’s gathering in Denver.
If Only Hunter Could Be There
Event-design as Rorschach test… Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year’s AEJMC Convention logo for an optimistic graph of media industries’ ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone…
Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun. I hope I can attend… (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)
Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event: “Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today’s students deal with Hunter S. Thompson‘s legacy?” He’s in my students’ textbook, on a page headed, Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He’s relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties — and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.
So let’s make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it’s a “yes” for Tim Harrower’s Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?
