“Academic-Professional ‘Chasm’” fills summer e-mail boxes

Posted by on June 25, 2012 · 2 Comments 

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:

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Editing Breakfast of Champions set for 8:15 a.m. Aug. 10

Posted by on June 2, 2012 · Leave a Comment 

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:

See you in Chicago!

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