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

Posted by on Monday, 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:

Those are contributions from Saturday through mid-day Monday; there were many more. For the full discussion, see the list page itself.

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About Bob Stepno
twitter.com/bobstep Radford University School of Communication faculty... UNC Ph.D. NandO.net Web news editor Wrote for... The Hartford Courant, Soundings, PC World

Comments

2 Responses to ““Academic-Professional ‘Chasm’” fills summer e-mail boxes”
  1. Bob Stepno says:
    June 28, 2012 at 4:34 pm

    When everyone is tired of full mailboxes, we could move discussions like this one here to the blog — if you want.

    Use the “Register” and “Login” buttons in the bottom right corner of this page to get a password so that you can login and comment.

    You can even link to an earlier comment in the e-mail list by cutting and pasting its address from the mailing list archive:

    List archive: http://aejmc.net/pipermail/news-list_aejmc.net/2012-June/

    One sample message: http://aejmc.net/pipermail/news-list_aejmc.net/2012-June/000523.html

    The comment’s editing window allows you to use an editing toolbar’s “link” icon to make the text do the linking within a sentence: I agree with something Bob said on Monday.

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  1. Professionals & academics: Why the divide? | Michael R. McCluskey says:
    July 3, 2012 at 7:10 pm

    [...] Those of us former professional journalists and current academics  face intriguing choices. many of which were tackled in a recent (and ongoing) debate on an AEJMC newspaper and online news listserv. You can find much of it here: http://aejmc.net/news/?p=1324 [...]