Research, teaching grants deadline: July 1
At many colleges and universities, expectations for research and innovative teaching are increasing just as opportunities for external funding to support such work are declining. The Newspaper Division of AEJMC is stepping into that breach with a new program of small grants.
The program will offer two grants for the 2011-2012 academic year:
- A $500 grant to support research on newspapers or their online units
- A $200 grant to support innovative teaching in courses related to newspapers or their online units
Click here to download the grant applications. Deadline for applying is 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on July 1, 2011. Applications should be submitted by email to newspaperdivisiongrants@gmail.com
The research grant could be used to cover some or all of the cost of such scholarly expenses as a research assistant, a subscription to an online survey program, travel to an archive, copying, mailing or transcription. The teaching grant could be used to cover such expenses as part of the cost of a piece of equipment or software, a student reporting trip or an honorarium for a professional who can teach students specific skills.
To qualify for consideration for a grant, applicants must be members of the Newspaper Division of AEJMC as of July 1, 2011. You can check your membership status by contacting AEJMC Membership Manager Pamella Price at aejmcmemsub@aol.com or 803-772-3507.
To apply for a teaching grant, applicants must, in addition, plan to be involved in teaching journalism or mass communication at the post-secondary level, as a full-time faculty member or instructor, adjunct professor, graduate-student teacher of record or teaching assistant between Sept. 1, 2011, and July 1, 2012.
Full-time faculty members, adjunct professors, graduate students and independent scholars are eligible to apply for the research grant. Members of the Newspaper Division’s executive board for 2010-2011 are not eligible to apply for either grant.
Grant recipients will be asked to provide a report on how they used grant funds to the head of the Newspaper Division by July 1, 2012.
If you have questions about the grant program, please contact Newspaper Division co-teaching chair Susan Keith of Rutgers University at susank@rutgers.edu
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
Google Unplugs Newspaper Scanning Project
The past may be prologue and newspapers may be the first rough draft of history, but less of that past will be searchable with Google. The company has informed newspaper publishers that it is ending a partnership project that had begun scanning about 2,000 newspapers’ microfilm and morgue collections.
The ambitious project, announced in 2008, originally hoped to put billions of news pages online, adding original scans to existing digital archives it had been cross-indexing since 2006 in conjunction with partners like Proquest and Heritage. “We’re looking for all the world’s primary sources, and the older, the better,” was the invitation on the project ‘about’ page.
The already-scanned archives are still searchable at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, including 19th and 20th century American and European papers, but Google said it will not be adding to the collection, and will return some unscanned materials to the publishers.
The Boston Phoenix, New England’s veteran alt-weekly, and the SearchEngineLand blog started getting the word out about Google’s decision to pull the plug on the scanning project. By Saturday no announcement had been added to Google’s original News Archive Partner page.
The project had made it possible for smaller papers to provide archive search to readers and researchers. Through Google’s search engine, users could combine a search of its full-text databases with the pay-per-view archives at The New York Times and other papers indexed by Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Carly Carioli of The Phoenix wrote:
News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers — especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn’t afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives — and a decent bet for Google.
It threaded a loophole for newspapers, who, in putting pre-internet archives online, generally would have had to sort out tricky rights issues with freelancers — but were thought to have escaped those obligations due to the method with which Google posted the archives. (Instead of posting the articles as pure text, Google posted searchable image files of the actual newspaper pages.) Google reportedly used its Maps technology to decipher the scrawl of ancient newsprint and microfilm; but newspapers are infamously more difficult to index than books, thanks to layout complexities such as columns and jumps, which require humans or intense algorithmic juju to decode.
Here’s two wild guesses: the process may have turned out to be harder than Google anticipated. Or it may have turned out that the resulting pages drew far fewer eyeballs than anyone expected.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/phlog/archive/2011/05/19/google-abandons-master-plan
AFP reported that Google had digitized more than 3.5 million daily or weekly editions, ranging from a 1752 edition of the Halifax Gazette and the 1895 London Advertiser to 85 years of the Milwaukee Sentinel.
The Guardian headlined its story Google euthanizes newspaper scan plan: We will organize the world’s information. Except the old newspapers.
Speaking of archives, here are the original Google blog announcement and Google video about the archive plan from 2008:
Here’s how Google described its News archive search to users on its help page:
News archive search searches across a large collection of historical archives including major newspapers/magazines, news archives and legal archives. Search results include both content that accessible to all users (such as BBC News, Time Magazine and Guardian) and content that requires a fee (such as Washington Post Archives, Newspaper Archive, and New York Times Archives). In addition to crawling content online, we’ve also worked with newspapers to digitize materials via our News Archive Partner Program. Through partnerships with newspapers around the world, the News Archive Partner Program makes unique and previously-unavailable newspaper content searchable and browsable online.
The general search results include a timeline in the left column, so that searchers can select recent years or decades into the past.
(This blog’s precursor had the story in 2008, complete with an attempt to find The Titanic in the archives, and a comparison with Proquest’s pay-per-view services. Here’s an updated version of that Titanic search, so that you can see timeline results. I recommend a visit to Dunkirk, NY, to see how The Grape Belt and Chautauqua Farmer covered the story.)
