Who needs newspapers? 50-state survey complete
“Embracing the Future,” by Paul Steinle & Sara Brown has been posted on the American Journalism Review website, and it appears in the spring, 2012 edition, of AJR.
The article highlights the findings of their 50-state, 50-newspaper inquiry into the status the American newspaper industry, Steinle said.
Brown, Steinle and two industry speakers also presented their work at the 2011 AEJMC conference. The presentation can be viewed online at Who Needs Newspapers?
The full results of the 50-state report are posted at
WhoNeedsNewspapers.org.
“We invite you to visit this site and use any materials that are posted there in your classroom,” Steinle said, in an email to AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division members. “Dr. Brown and I have also commented on our findings in several classrooms across the USA via Skype interviews, and we would be willing to continue to do that practice if any of you would find it useful.”
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.
Educator of the Year
Leslie-Jean Thornton, an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State, received the division’s Educator of the Year award from teaching tri-chair Brian Carroll.
Newspaper Division research at the 2011 AEJMC convention
At the Newspaper Division business meeting Aug. 11, Research Chair Jin Yang reported that the division received 85 student and faculty research paper submissions for the 2011 national meeting in St. Louis. Of those, 50 papers were accepted, for a 59 percent acceptance rate. The division was sixth in paper submissions in AEJMC, behind Mass Communication and Society (141 submissions), Communication Technology (122), COMSHER (120), Advertising (117) and Cultural and Critical Studies (89).
Newspaper Division membership
During the Newspaper Division business meeting Thursday, Aug. 11, at the AEJMC convention in St. Louis, division Head John Carvalho reported that the Newspaper Division has 488 members, keeping it as the largest division in AEJMC, a few members ahead of Mass Communication and Society.
It’s #aejmc11 on Twitter
Updated later in the week without changing the date-stamp above. Do add additional Twitter links in the comments area if I left out your best Tweets, and feel free to add all of the @-marked division members to your own “follow” list — for example, I’m http://twitter.com/bobstep
Alas, your mild-mannered Web editor is staying in Virginia the week of the St. Louis conference.
Would anyone using Twitter from the soon-to-be Newspaper and Online News division please use the official hashtag #aejmc11 to report on this week’s doings — especially to spread the word about division plans for the future. Just click that #aejmc11 hashtag marker to see what people have been saying about the convention, even if you don’t have a Twitter account of your own.
(You also may find some convention news at the more generic #aejmc marker or the early (wrong) guess #aejmc2011.)
Please do either add some comments to this blog post or e-mail me information to share with other homebound division members. And if anyone wants to use this space to live-blog panels or meetings, ask a division officer on site and/or contact me.
Meanwhile, I’ll add some tidbits from the tweets here:
- Due to Twitter’s length limitation, @Steve Fox tweeted the address of his Slideshare “Panel on Partnerships” presentation without its full title, which clearly makes it appropriate for this division: Challenges to the City-Based Newspaper Business: Opportunities for Journalism and Mass Communication Programs. Also some nice symmetry, if you glance down to the last/first tweet on this list.
- @garykebbel: “Knight Foundation is funding a contest for educators to use Knight News Challenge innovations. #aejmc11 #knightfdn” (Until someone offers a more specific link, try KnightFoundation.org Innovating Media page, or KCNN.org or the KCNN’s Things We Like page.)
- Mark Coddington: Just saw the presentation on this study at #aejmc11. Very smart tweak to previous research. slate.me/r3NN7U” (Slate article referring to Brendan R. Watson: “Article on my research at #aejmc11 RT @jackshafer: New @Slate: “Bloggers, Not Parasites” http://slate.me/pkMVAm)”
- @andybechtel,
Andy Bechtel: “Newspaper Division of @aejmc and ACES are teaming up for an award for research about editing. Details, paper call coming this fall.” - @BillCelis: Compelling convo abt Latino newspapers and impact on past and present by @USCAnnenberg Prof Felix Gutierrez #aejmc11 #ascj
- Hard to tell from the retweets who on what panel actually said, “Be weekly in print and daily online,” and whether they were talking about changing daily newspapers, weeklies or magazines… but the line developed tweet-legs around the time my tired eyes had me “weakly online.”
- Also hard to tell whether this is LJ Thornton commenting on or quoting from Merrill Perlman’s presentation: “ljthornton: Any journalism school that doesn’t teach students to self-edit shouldn’t call itself a j-school/@meperl” (Good thought, in either case.)
- @andybechtel shared addresses of additional editing champs on Twitter: ACES president Teresa Schmedding is @tschmedding; Merrill Perlman is @meperl; Joy Mayer is @mayerjoy
- Two tweets from @steveklein after discussion of journalism faculty not being on Twitter: “There is a real lack of intellectual curiosity when it comes to technology and changing communication platforms in academia…. Very sorry to say it, but I see far too many similarities in the journalism industry and academia. It’s scary, really.”
- ralphehanson Ralph Hanson tweets on community newspapers, apparently from panel on online initiatives at community papers:
- “Use website to publish public meeting minutes. Use newspaper to publish stories.”
- “Look at houstonherald.com for successful online community paper site.”
- “Be a weekly in print, a daily online.”
- “Big online issue for community papers: Should obits be behind pay wall?”
- “Community paper editors should be sure to present news about safety/disasters to everyone, not just subscribers.”
- Thanks @JoMCParkLib Stephanie Willen Brown for link to Penny Abernathy’s newspaper-related biz model / community journalism material — second section here: http://ow.ly/1vCSDr
- Twitter can be quite an echo-chamber for gasp-prompting sensational statements like the one below… without room for clear sources in its character-count limited space. So thanks to LJThorntion for mentioning that grading stats being tossed around are at GradeInflation.com by Stuart Rojstaczer
- Ditto Dale Cressman for telling us:
“Slides from the #aejmc11 panel on grade inflation are here: http://bit.ly/oZTwQH” - @jbatsell: Gasps in the room as speaker’s research shows that 43 percent of all college grades are now A’s. #aejmc11
- @journtoolbox Journalist’s Toolbox
Nice tool for the #aejmc11 crew: http://newspapermap.com/ #newspapers #journalism - A Matter of Life and Death? Examining the Quality of Newspaper Coverage on the Newspaper Crisis tweeted by Seth C. Lewis
- @genevaoh Geneva Overholser:
“Educational institutions are ripe for disintermediation, says #aejmc11 keynoter. I couldn’t agree more, having lived thru it in journalism” - Transformation of leading journalism schools detailed in a new report released today. knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightbl… #CKJED #AEJMC tweeted by Eric Newton (@EricNewton1) of Knight Foundation
- Blogging about journalism history — why and why bother? tweeted by Joe Campbell, with yet another Twitter hashtag of #aejmcblogging
- “D’oh! “@stretchphoto: #aejmc11 “Holy 20th Century, Batman. There’s no wifi in the hotel rooms!”" Retweeted by Andy Bechtel
- “Valuable intel
RT @Brizzyc: Learned that Budweiser is $5 at conference hotel (Renaissance). In ST. LOUIS. Bud. Good grief. #AEJMC” Retweeted by Steve Fox (but without the convention-specific hashtag)
The last two items may explain a lot… (Our WordPress software turns the : – ) characters into automatically, by the way.)
– Bob aka @bobstep on Twitter
https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep
Teaching Challenge Continues Through June
Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century — plus five weeks
The deadline for TNT21, the Newspaper Division’s teaching ideas competition, has been extended to July 1. That means you have five more weeks to put together a submission that might earn a cash award.
Entries should be about teaching newswriting, reporting or editing.
A prize of $100 will be awarded for the best teaching idea from each of three groups of teachers:
- full-time faculty,
- adjunct professors, and
- graduate students.
Ideas will be judged for their originality, innovative nature, ease of application, completeness, writing and whether they would work in more than one course and/or at different types of schools. All entries should reflect:
- Original teaching ideas that have not been published elsewhere or adapted from another instructor’s work
- Ideas that have not been winners or finalists in other teaching awards competitions
- Ideas that have not been simultaneously submitted to other 2011 AEJMC division or interest group teaching awards competitions. Ideas that have been submitted, for example, to the 2011 Great Ideas for Teachers competition sponsored by the Community College Journalism Association and AEJMC’s Small Programs Interest Group, Scholastic Journalism Division and Graduate Education Interest Group are not eligible.
The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time July 1. Attendance at the AEJMC convention in August is NOT required to receive the award.
For an application and full information, go to
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~susank/NWSP/TNT21.html
Leadtime Looks to St. Louis & Online
The Newspaper Division’s 
Winter 11 Leadtime newsletter is here — possibly the last to carry the division’s original name.
As division head John Carvalho notes in the newsletter, 73 percent of voting members recently supported changing the division name to “Newspaper & Online News” — “both recognizing our division’s heritage and incorporating the changes that it has experienced.”
In other news, Leadtime has last-minute tips on meeting the April 1 deadline for conference papers, and details on the division’s program at the August event in St. Louis.
As Carvalho notes, the name-change decision goes to the folks at AEJMC headquarters and president Jan Slater, for the next step… which presumably at some point will include the official change on newsletter, blog and homepage nameplates.
(Your Web editor hopes we will keep this “http://aejmc.net/news” and the archival “http://aejmc.net/newspaper” address and not be ordered to shift to “/non” or “/naon,” lest someone think we are involved with non-news or the misspelled noon-news. )
Explosively good teaching? Enter TNT-21
From Susan Keith:
Do you have an idea for improving the teaching of newswriting, reporting or editing?
If so, enter it in the AEJMC Newspaper Division’s teaching competition, Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century, for the chance to earn recognition and a cash prize.
A prize of $100 will be awarded for the best teaching idea from each of three groups of teachers:
- full-time faculty,
- adjunct professors, and
- graduate students.
This year’s deadline is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time May 20, which should allow professors to enter ideas they used in courses during spring 2011. Attendance at the AEJMC convention in August is NOT required to receive the award.
For an application and more information, go to http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~susank/NWSP/TNT21.html or http://tinyurl.com/y3a8cm7
