On a more serious note, one cannot help but be a little stunned by the attention these hirings have received from all corners of the internet.

Thank heavens for educator-commentators such as NYU’s Jay Rosen, who snarked on Twitter: “Good to see Politico bringing voice to the voiceless, isn’t it?”

What Jay said.

An excerpt:

In a way, journalism can best be defined by what it’s not. It’s not a shouting match. It’s not just holding out a microphone. It’s not even just who, what, when, where, why and how. It’s the work of committed people who actually believe that what they do is important.

- “out of fear for his safety.”
- “out of fear of retaliation from X.”
- “because parties to the negotiations had promised to keep them confidential.”
- “because the company has threatened to fire workers who speak to the press.”
- “because Politician X insists that his aides not speak to reporters.”
- “to avoid antagonizing Official X.”
- “because disclosing grand jury testimony can be illegal.”

And how did Gawker get this memo, by the way? An unnamed source, of course.

… A newspaper pay wall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer: even if every single print buyer is successfully converted to the pay wall, newspapers will still face a basic problem of scale. … Pay walls will not be able to compensate for lower revenue per reader by expanding the audience for paid news, due to the long term decline of circulation, free online news, 24-hour broadcast news and free-sheets. … Future change will be radical: publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper its loyal readers recognise and value with just 200 rather than 500 journalists …

At the same time, News Corporation/News International magnate Rupert Murdoch seems to be standing firm in his dedication to the paywalls recently erected around his English flagship broadsheets, the Times and Sunday Times, despite a raft of really bad news. Says the Independent:

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”

So, Murdoch’s looking uncharacteristically willing to invest significant resources into a (so far, apparently) failing venture. Is this sheer entrepreneurial hubris, an unwillingness to admit a bad move? I doubt it. My guess is that the revenues and stature lost at the Times Online simply don’t add up to enough for Murdoch to pull the plug on the experiment. Time and page visits will tell.

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.

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.

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

Background

J-Lab on Networked Journalism

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.)

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.

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.

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.”