“Academic-Professional ‘Chasm’” fills summer e-mail boxes
A spirited discussion of academic research and its relevance to professional journalism poured into the in-boxes of division members on the weekend of June 23 via the Newspaper & Online News Division mailing list. By Monday close to 50 members had been heard from and comments were still being added. And it kept going…
Update July 2:
The mailing list discussion prompted this July 2 summary and response by AEJMC President Linda Steiner, of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Among other things, she points to the Research You Can Use webpage highlighting studies from AEJMC journals.
Update: The discussion kept going… Downloaded from the list archive, the June mail (admittedly inflated by the quoted responses) is a 1.1 MB text file, double the size of the last major use of the mailing list, a July 2008 discussion of renaming the division to add “and Online” to the name.
For the terminally text-oriented, that’s almost 600 pages of 10-pt Courier, including all the mail headers and repeated replied-to messages. The who-replied-to-whom discussion could be much easier to follow if it had been done in the comment section of this blog, but hitting “reply” to an e-mail message is still so much easier.
Utah State’s Ted Pease launched the conversation with his response to “How Journalism Professionals and Educators Can Close the Chasm,” an essay by Jerry Ceppos, new dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. Many of the responses included links to further discussion on members’ blogs and websites.
For anyone who, like me, inadvertently hit a “delete conversation” button on a (dumb) smartphone instead of archiving the discourse to read later, here’s a reminder that mailing-list items can be retrieved by date, topic or keyword at the list-server website. The links below go to the first 48 hours of discussion. The June discussion is here.
How it began:
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” Dr. Dane S. Claussen
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” SkyeDent at aol.com
Read more
Editing Breakfast of Champions set for 8:15 a.m. Aug. 10
From Andy Bechtel, UNC-Chapel Hill
Let’s have breakfast in Chicago
The Breakfast of Editing Champions returns to the AEJMC national conference in Chicago on Friday, Aug. 10. I’m the organizer and moderator for the event, succeeding the wonderful Deborah Gump in that role.
The breakfast, which will begin at 8:15 a.m., is free and open to anyone who teaches editing, appreciates editing or simply likes to hang around editing professors. That should be pretty much everyone, right?
This year’s breakfast is BYOB: Bring Your Own Bagel. I’m working on providing coffee for everyone. If you would like to attend, please RSVP by signing up here. Please do so by Monday, Aug. 6.
The agenda is simple, yet fundamental to journalism that matters: the future of editing and editing education. This year’s breakfast will include a panel discussion on the teaching of social media in editing courses. Panelists will be:
- Amy Bartner, social media editor at The Indianapolis Star
- Sue Burzynski Bullard, University of Nebraska
- Scott Kleinberg, social media consultant, Tribune Company
- Leslie-Jean Thornton, Arizona State University
A highlight of the breakfasts has been the Teaching Idea Exchange, in which we swap assignments and strategies. Jill Van Wyke of Drake University will again handle the exchange this year, so send your best teaching idea or tip to her at jill.vanwyke@drake.edu by Tuesday, July 31. Send her a few paragraphs on your idea and be ready to discuss it for a minute or two at the breakfast.
Special thanks to the sponsors of this year’s breakfast:
- American Copy Editors Society (www.copydesk.org)
- Newspaper and Online News Division of AEJMC (http://aejmc.net/newspaper)
- Poynter’s News University (http://www.newsu.org)
- School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill (http://jomc.unc.edu)
See you in Chicago!
Spring LeadTime Leads to Chicago Centennial Convention
AEJMC returns to its roots for its 100-year anniversary. Read all about it!
See the spring LeadTime newsletter for convention information, including the Newspaper and Online News Division’s panels, hotel facts, and the division chair’s reflections on AEJMC’s beginnings a century ago:
Broadcast news was years away and the Internet a science-fiction fantasy when 18 journalism professors came to Chicago that year to found the American Association for Teachers of Journalism…
– Chris Roberts
Also included: The entry form for the newspaper project award and information about a new ACES Award For Research On Editing, and more.
Newspaper Research Journal seeks reviewers
The Newspaper Research Journal, the peer-reviewed research publication of the Newspaper and Online News Division, is seeking new reviewers.
Interested people should send an email to nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org. Editor Sandra Utt will forward a list of areas of interest for reviews.
As the journal’s site says, it “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 and online journalism, serving as a bridge between newspaper professionals and scholars.”
Call for entries: The division’s newspaper project award
CALL FOR ENTRIES:
2012 AEJMC NEWSPAPER AND ONLINE NEWS DIVISION NEWSPAPER PROJECT AWARD
May 1 deadline
The AEJMC Newspaper and Online News Division’s Newspaper Project Award recognizes publications produced by students and professors in journalism classes or as special curricular projects connected to courses. To qualify, the publication must have been edited and produced as part of the curriculum, text reported and written by students, and professors must have been responsible for editing and/or advising. Magazines, newsletters or Yellow Page-like compilations will not be accepted. Eligible publications must have been published in either the 2010-2011 or 2011-2012 academic years. Online newspaper publications are eligible and may be submitted on a DVD or CD. The following form should be filled out and accompany the entry: Read more
Newspaper story, online, has new life cycles, many questions
“Convoluted” is the key word in this graphic portrayal of the life of a news story today, thanks to our new post-blog, mid-Twitter, online universe:
The New Convoluted Life Cycle of a Newspaper Story
Lauren Michell Rabaino of The Seattle Times raises fascinating issues in that illustrated article at MediaBistro’s “10,000 words” blog, opening with the observation that, “News must be really hard to follow for an everyday consumer of a newspaper website.”
As an online producer for the Seattle paper, as well as blogger at laurenmichell.com and an active Twitter user as @laurenmichell, she gives examples from the BBC and Los Angeles Times sites, as well as her own publication. She reports on a recent critique of “episodic” news reporting and throws the idea of more wiki-like publications into the mix, along with a discussion of how to implement updates in content management systems.
Rabaino’s item also suggests there is plenty of room for descriptive and comparative research by AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division members. After reading her piece, I just kept coming up with more questions… Read more
Fall Leafxxx LeadTime is here
The Fall 2011 edition of LeadTime, the Newspaper and Online News Division newsletter, is available for downloading here and in the LeadTime archives.
Featured articles include the call for papers for the Southeast Colloquium (deadline Dec. 5), a profile of Curtis MacDougall and the division’s MacDougall student paper award, a visit to China with University of Memphis professors Jin Yang and David Arant, the news that the division is teaming up with the American Copy Editors Society to create the ACES Award For Research On Editing, and a “news ecosystems” panel report from the 2011 convention.
Chris Roberts, 2011-12 head of the division, also offers reflections on the Newspaper and Online News Division name change and other signs that journalism, like the word “media,” is plural.
Southeast colloquium papers due Dec.5
The AEJMC 2012 Southeast Colloquium will be in Blacksburg, Va., March 8-10, hosted by the Department of Communication at Virginia Tech.
The deadline for research paper submissions is 5 p.m. Dec. 5, 2011. Papers should be submitted electronically to the division research paper chairs, including, for the Newspaper and Online News Division, Jeffrey C. South at Virginia Commonwealth University, jcsouth@vcu.edu
Call for Chicago panel proposals – deadline Oct. 15
The AEJMC Newspaper and Online News Division (our new name, as of Oct. 1) is accepting panel proposals for the 2012 convention in Chicago, Aug. 9-12. Read more
Research, teaching grants
A University of Oregon Ph.D. candidate and a University of Arizona professor won the division’s inaugural research and teaching awards. Arthur D. Santana of Oregon, a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post and Seattle Times, took home the research award, which provides $500 for his project on online comments, titled Civility, Anonymity and the Breakdown of a New Public Sphere. Jeannine E. Relly of Arizona will receive $200 for a student reporting trip to Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Ariz.
