The Foundation-Inspired “Teaching Hospital” Discussion
Before and during the Chicago convention, the Newspaper & Online News Division’s email list had a spirited discussion inspired by Howard Finbeg of Poynter in response to an “open letter to university presidents” from executives of several foundations.
The foundations endorsed a “teaching hospital” model of journalism education and cautioned university administrators, “Schools that do not update their curriculum and upgrade their faculties to reflect the profoundly different digital age of communication will find it difficult to raise money from foundations interested in the future of news.”
Here are some key links for the discussion:
- Open Letter to University Presidents
- Knight Foundation blog by Eric Newton
- Finberg’s article about it at Poynter
- August discussion email list archive, with contributions from Howard Finberg, Dane Claussen, Bill Reader, Carrie Brown, John Russial, John Zibluk, Bob Stepno, Ann Brill, Chris Roberts, Andrew Ciofalo, Gary Kebbel, Brian Baresch, Skye Dent, Kathleen Hansen, Howard Schlossbert, Michael Abrams, Larry Dailey, Robert Picard, Maureen Croteau, Daryl Moen, and perhaps more by now.
The original foundation letter signers, and their organizations:
- Eric Newton, senior adviser, Knight Foundation
- Clark Bell, journalism program director, McCormick Foundation
- Bob Ross, president and CEO, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation
- Mike Philipps, president and CEO, Scripps Howard Foundation
- Linda Shoemaker, president, Brett Family Foundation
- Davis Haas, chair, Wyncote Foundation
Plans (and a hashtag) for this week’s convention
Dear Colleagues:
Here’s one last reminder of how you can take part in the Newspaper and Online News Division’s activities this week during the AEJMC’s 100th anniversary convention in Chicago:
• Hang out with fellow members at Ed Debevic’s restaurant on Wednesday night. Find Mitch McKenney in the Marriott Lobby at 7 p.m. (He says he’ll be the “balding guy holding a Chicago Tribune.”) The restaurant is at 640 N. Wells Street.
• Take a look at our programs: The Summer LeadTime lists the times and dates for our research presentations and panel discussions. Be sure to drop by.
• Download the app: Go to the Android Market or Apple App Store, download the free “Guidebook” app, and then search for the AEJMC guide.
• Attend our Friday meeting: The business meeting begins at 8:30 p.m. in Chicago G&H, on the fifth floor.
• Join the conversation via social media.
o Conference hashtag: #aejmc2012
o Newspaper and Online Division hashtag: #aejmcNOND
I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.
–Chris
Dr. Chris Roberts
Head, Newspaper and Online News Division
Hail to the winners, during Friday’s Division meeting
Graphic by Leslie-Jean Thornton, Arizona State
At the start of our meeting we’ll honor Brooks — and present plaques, certificates, and/or checks to winners of our academic paper and TNT21 (Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century) competitions.
The meeting begins at 8:30 p.m. Friday in Chicago G&H, which is on the fifth floor of the convention hotel.
See you there.
Chris Roberts, Ph.D.
Head, Newspaper and Online News Division
Assistant professor, University of Alabama
Division seeks research, PF&R leaders for 2012-13
As we prepare for next week’s convention, I thought I’d update you on the proposed leadership lineup for 2012-13 and to seek volunteers to serve in key positions next year. As I’ll discuss later, we’re looking for help with Research and with our Professional and Freedom committees.
As you may know, the Division’s leadership in the last few years has moved in a four-year track from research co-chair (two years) to vice chair for programming, and then to Division head. That will not be the case this year, because Memphis’ Jin Yang has announced that, with regrets, she cannot move to Division head. She’s working on a U.S.-China project that is requiring more travel time. Jin has served faithfully for three years in research and programming, and we are grateful for her hard work.
Leslie-Jean Thornton of Arizona State has graciously agreed to stand for election to Division head. She previously served on the leadership track, and now tenured (and as last year’s winner of the division’s “Educator of the Year” award) will be my nominee to be Division head.
In 2012-13 we will need:
- Two people to serve as co-chairs of the research committee.
- One to serve as a co-chair of the Professional Freedom and Responsibility committee.
* Research: This year’s co-chairs were CUNY-York’s Claire Serant, who is moving to the division’s vice head for programming, and Florida’s Ron Rodgers, who is the new book review editor for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
Duties involve running the division’s blind-reviewed paper competitions for the 2013 AEJMC convention in Washington, D.C. You’ll help recruit judges, handle the calls for papers in three categories (student division, open division, and our new American Society of Copy Editors special call), assign papers to judges, and ultimately select papers for presentation. You’ll be busiest in early April in assigning judges to papers, and again in May as you finalize the paper presentation lineups. You’ll have plenty of help from the division’s leaders (and former leaders) who have done this rewarding job.
We generally want a two-year commitment for the research job, but that may not be the case as one of the two may move to programming in 2014.
* PF&R: We also need one person to serve as a co-chair. The key duty is to write for our newsletter, and to do other tasks as requested by the division head.
If you are interested and/or want more information, please contact me at croberts@ua.edu. I’ll answer promptly and can even meet with you in Chicago to walk through the job descriptions.
A reminder that our member’s meeting begins at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 10. I hope to see you there.
Chris Roberts, Ph.D.
Head, Newspaper and Online News Division
Assistant professor, University of Alabama
LeadTime leads way to Chicago
See the newsletter for the division’s Chicago convention events and more. (The image is just a preview — click it to download the full 17-page newsletter as a PDF file.)
For additional information, see the Spring Leadtime.
“Academic-Professional ‘Chasm’” fills summer e-mail boxes
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:
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” Dr. Dane S. Claussen
- AEJMC Newspaper & Online News Division The academic-professional “chasm” SkyeDent at aol.com
Read more
Editing Breakfast of Champions set for 8:15 a.m. Aug. 10
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:
- American Copy Editors Society (www.copydesk.org)
- Newspaper and Online News Division of AEJMC (http://aejmc.net/newspaper)
- Poynter’s News University (http://www.newsu.org)
- School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill (http://jomc.unc.edu)
See you in Chicago!
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.”
Spring LeadTime Leads to Chicago Centennial Convention
AEJMC returns to its roots for its 100-year anniversary. Read all about it!
See the spring LeadTime newsletter for convention information, including the Newspaper and Online News Division’s panels, hotel facts, and the division chair’s reflections on AEJMC’s beginnings a century ago:
Broadcast news was years away and the Internet a science-fiction fantasy when 18 journalism professors came to Chicago that year to found the American Association for Teachers of Journalism…
– Chris Roberts
Also included: The entry form for the newspaper project award and information about a new ACES Award For Research On Editing, and more.
Newspaper pros, students Tweet conference events
There’s a whole lot of tweeting going on this week from the Newspaper Association of America and American Society of News Editors event in Washington, President Obama speech included… and some excellent use of their conference “hashtags” on Twitter, with links to stories by student journalists and others.
Even if you don’t have a Twitter account (but you should!), you can follow the links from the event-specific tags NAAmXc, ASNE12:
- https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23NAAmXc
- https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23asne12
- https://twitter.com/#!/NAAupdates
- NAAmediaXchange
- Note that organization-name hashtags are risky… producing links to everything from aviation to the National Autism Association https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23NAA
- Other confusion “@asne” is not the American organization; it’s someone in Osaka who hasn’t used the address, but got there first. The American Society of News Editors website is asne.org (not .com; that’s someone else again) and its Twitter handle is @NewsEditors: https://twitter.com/#!/NewsEditors
Samples of what’s going on, in no particular order — also interesting folks to follow if you do have a Twitter account. (Mine is https://twitter.com/#!/bobstep) Admittedly, this is not journalism; it’s cutting-and-pasting links so that I can find them later myself… 
Steve Buttry ? 
Arianna Huffington ? @ariannahuff: Early morning in DC, on my way to #ASNE12 to talk about newsroom innovation w/ @JillAbramson, @Cafreeland, Donna Byrd, and Kathleen Caroll
Michael Stowe ?: NYT’s Jill Abramson: Our passion for high quality journalism has not changed. Times even opening new news bureaus. 
Knight Foundation ? 
David Boardman ? 
Carole Tarrant ? 
Doris N. Truong ? 
Jeff Selingo ? 
NAA ? 
Ebyline ? 
Perfect Market ? 
Shana Hoch ? 
Vikki Porter ? 
Poynter ? 
Owen Youngman ? 
Jeff Sonderman ? ? 