The Newspaper Association of America posted a press release yesterday about the increase in mobile traffic to newspaper websites. The NAA had this to say in their release:

“Newspaper publishers increased page views to their mobile content by 65 percent on average in September compared to the same month one year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Many newspapers reported triple-digit page view increases to their mobile sites and apps, demonstrating that newspaper content remains a leading choice for consumers across their multiplatform offerings.

“NAA’s analysis is based on traffic figures for more than 20 newspaper media companies – large and small, public and private – that supplied year-over-year internal measurements of mobile page view traffic and unique visitors from September 2010 and September 2011. Unique visitor count increases ranged as high as 200 percent, with an average increase of about 70 percent for the publishers reporting.

You can read the full press release on the NAA website here

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Nov. 21, 2011 | The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is committed to freedom of speech and the press in the United States and abroad. AEJMC supports citizens’ and journalists’ First Amendment rights in every city and every state, including in participating in the Occupy movement. AEJMC fully supports the Occupy protesters’ freedom of speech and assembly as a whole, and urges that journalists’ right—and responsibility–to cover these important matters of public concern be respected by all law enforcement officials. This is all the more compelling because other countries are closely watching how city, state, and federal governments handle the Occupy movement across the United States.

While recognizing the need for law enforcement officers to maintain public safety, AEJMC encourages public officials and law enforcement officers to work with Occupy participants and journalists covering their protests to ensure that basic constitutional freedoms are maintained and not encroached. The rights to protest and to criticize government are core values enjoying Constitutional protection. Additionally, the press must be allowed to freely communicate to the public information about these important and powerful demonstrations and the ideas they express. AEJMC reminds public officials at every level of government that as a nation we are and should be exceptionally committed to the often tested proposition that, as the Supreme Court of the United States declared in 1964, debates on matters of public concern remain “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

For further information: Contact Linda Steiner, President, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2011-2012
Available at lsteiner@jmail.umd.edu
973-762-6919 (Nov 21-27). After Nov 28: 301-405-2426

About PAC
The AEJMC President’s Advisory Council allows the association’s president to weigh in on important issues that are central to the association’s mission. A three-member subcommittee of the Standing Committee of Professional Freedom and Responsibility helps inform and advise the president of important issues.

About AEJMC
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The Association’s mission is to advance education, foster scholarly research, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of communication.

Here’s a quick recap of the top journalism and mass communication news from this past week. Most of the articles and posts mentioned below were sent out from our Twitter account earlier in the week. Enjoy!

• News360: A Pandora for News?
• 6 Data Journalism Blogs To Bookmark, Part 2 
• Online enrollment grows but doubts still persist
• Twitter Ordered to Give Up WikiLeaks Data
• Another blogger has been killed in Mexico for reporting about gang activity
• Romenesko Leaves Poynter After Conflict Over Quotes
• Poynter Review: ESPN’s early coverage of Penn State sexual abuse scandal slow, ‘tone-deaf’
• The 50 Best Books for Journalism Students
• The problem with retweets & how journalists can solve it
• “Free to Tweet” promotion will award $5K to students who celebrate 1st Amendment most creatively through social media

Adobe announced this week that it will no longer develop a mobile version of its Flash program. In a statement released by Adobe they said,

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Joshua Benton, at Nieman Journalism Lab, wrote a post about what this means for news organizations. He said that the lack of a mobile Flash player impacts the video, interactive graphics and advertisements on news websites. The technology will still work on computers, but mobile devices won’t have the same options for displaying the media. The announcement will help push news organizations to adapt to HTML5, if they haven’t started already, but could hinder the sharing and displaying of content that’s already in the Flash format.

You can read Benton’s post here.

Press Release from the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University

School census shows strong high school student media presence
Study reveals online presence lagging, poor and minority students excluded

(KENT, OHIO) Nov. 8, 2011 – The Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University today released its 2011 Scholastic Journalism Census results, one of the most extensive national counts of American public high school student media ever conducted. The findings reveal student media presence remains strong in American public high schools, but schools with large poor and minority student populations have diminished opportunities. Findings also show that online student media numbers are lagging across the country, and yearbooks outnumber newspapers as the most common form of student media.

Of the schools surveyed, 96 percent offer some opportunity for students to create content in a school-sponsored journalistic activity, leaving only four percent that exclude student media from their schools entirely.

“Our study doesn’t really tell us how healthy high school journalism is, but it does confirm that it’s there and in large numbers,” said Mark Goodman, Center for Scholastic Journalism Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism.

Goodman said he hopes the telling results from this year’s Scholastic Journalism Census will prompt a periodic assessment of the state of scholastic media.

“We want this count to provide a baseline from which we can assess changes in student journalism over time,” he said.

Other key report findings include:

• Fifty-four percent of students in schools without any student media qualify for free or a reduced lunch price. In schools with student media offerings, that number is 41 percent.
• Public high schools across the country publish more than 11,000 student newspapers outnumbering daily and weekly U.S. newspapers by more than 3,000 publications.
• More schools have a student yearbook than any other form of student media.
• More than 15,000 public high schools offer a journalism or publications class, and the majority of all student media activities are produced in relationship to a class.
• Only 33 percent of surveyed schools have any form of online student media, and only 8 percent publish materials strictly online.
• The average school with student media has 873 students and a 35 percent minority population. The average school without student media has 222 students with a 56 percent minority population.
  

The study’s principal investigators were Mark Goodman, Kent State University Professor and Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism; Candace Perkins Bowen, Kent State University Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for Scholastic Journalism; and Piotr Bobkowski, University of Kansas Assistant Professor.

In their research, the investigators mailed paper surveys to a random sample of 4,354 public high schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They received responses from 1,023 of those schools between Feb. 1 and June 6, 2011 for a 23.5 percent response rate.

For a complete copy of the 2011 Scholastic Journalism Census results, visit the CSJ website.

About the Center for Scholastic Journalism
The Center for Scholastic Journalism is a national clearinghouse committed to conducting and collecting the best research on scholastic media and the role it plays in journalism education. As an advocate for high school and middle school journalism, the Center strives to be both a resource for information about youth journalism and journalism education and one of the most effective national voices supporting scholastic journalism and freedom of press outlined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. For more information about the Center for Scholastic Journalism, visit www.csjkent.org. 

### 

By Amir Efrati on WSJ, Nov. 8 2011 

Twitter is becoming a big star on TV–and now the online-messaging service wants to shine even brighter.

A growing number of TV shows such as Fox’s “Glee” and PBS’s “Nova” regularly direct their viewers to Twitter in order to view and broadcast short messages, called tweets, about the shows.

Some live shows, such as NBC’s “The Voice,” take it a step further by displaying tweets by viewers on the air, thanks to companies such as Mass Relevance, which helps find the most relevant tweets. The TV appearances have helped Twitter increase its active user base, which stands at more than 100 million people worldwide.

On Monday, Twitter announced that Mass Relevance and another Twitter-analysis company, Crimson Hexagon, now have unfettered access to the more than 250 million tweets broadcast on Twitter every day so that they can directly work on such partnerships with media firms without Twitter’s help.

Read the full post on the Wall Street Journal website

Many news organizations have handed out guidelines to their staff about the use of retweets on Twitter. Their rules are there to help stop any controversial tweets before they get associated with the organization, or at least to encourage their employees to think twice before retweeting.

In a post on Poynter, Jeff Sonderman had this to say about the topic:

The Washington Post’s guidelines tell reporters not to tweet anything that could be perceived as reflecting political bias or favoritism. The Associated Press just published new retweet guidelines warning that retweets can appear to express a reporter’s opinion.

The result is a lot of confusion and fear that a “mistweet” could cost journalists their credibility or their jobs. That is a shame, because Twitter is a vibrant network for real-time information, and journalists should participate fully in it. The retweet is the network’s method of spreading information, and journalists should understand how it works.

The post goes on to suggest the use of a new designation, “NT”, to specify that a user is retweeting something as a neutral tweet. You can read the full post on Poynter here.

Do you think current journalism students will have to deal with this issue when they get their first job?

Through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AEJMC has funded ten proposals to develop innovative and creative academic applications of projects already funded through the Knight News Challenge. The goal is to implement these projects in ways that enhance the education of future journalists for the new media landscape. Individual grants are up to $8,000 each.

Below are the recipients of 2011-12 Bridge Grants (alpha):

1. Ingrid Bachmann and Sebastian Valenzuela, Universidad Catolica de Chile; (Ushahidi) “Adopting Ushahidi for Crowdsourcing and Data Visualization: New Paths for Event-mapping in Chile”
2. Peter (Piotr) Bobkowski, University of Kansas; (Printcasting/FeedBrewer) “Kansas.com High School News Feed”
3. Serena Carpenter and Nancie Dodge, Arizona State University; (CityCircles) “CityCircles Light Rail Job Classifieds”
4. Julie Jones and John Schmeltzer, University of Oklahoma; (Ushahidi) “Reporting from the Storm”
5. Jacqueline Marino, Kent State University; “OpenBlock Campus”
6. Ray Murray, Oklahoma State University; (DocumentCloud) “In-depth Reporting of Methamphetamine Production and Abuse in Oklahoma”
7. Cindy Royal and Jacie Yang, Texas State University San Marcos; (VIDI) “Telling Stories with Data: Life at a Hispanic Serving University”
8. Hyunjin Seo, University of Kansas. (OpenBlock) “LarryvilleKU: Web and Mobile Application of OpenBlock to The Kansan”
9. Adam Wagler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; (BookBrewer,Politiwidgets, DocumentCloud) “Photojournalism and Social Engagement Tablet App”
10. Amy Schmitz Weiss, San Diego State University; (Ushahidi) “@SDSU — Where’s the News?”

Creative Commons: Shannan Mortimer

A Canadian media commentator, Mathew Ingram, gave his opinions in a post the other day on how online newspapers can make money without paywalls. His ideas are for papers to sell non-news products such as ebooks and online events. He also suggested that news organizations look at their platforms to bring in money. Ingram said news organizations could sell their application programming interface (API) to companies who could build on them, similar to what The Guardian does.

Although the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the The Economist are using paywalls effectively, he said that not everyone can duplicate what their doing because those publications have highly targeted markets. As for the New York Times’ paywall, Ingram said the NYT is a leading brand for national and international news and other publications would have a hard time modeling their success. Ingram also has a pessimistic view on the continued growth of NYT online subscribers.

You can read Matthew Ingram’s post here.

Other sources: 

• The Guardian: Stop Taking the ‘Paywall Pill’ by Pioneering New Forms of Online Revenue

From C. W. Anderson, Tom Glaisyer, Jason Smith, New America Foundation and Marika Rothfeld

As the media industry evolves to meet the challenges of the emerging digitally-networked era, so too are journalism schools. Democracy and healthy local communities require this evolution. As the media industry reshapes itself, a tremendous opportunity emerges for America’s journalism programs. Neither news organizations nor journalism programs will disappear, but both must rethink their missions, particularly now that many more people can be journalists (at least, on an occasional basis) and many more people produce media than ever before.

Journalism education programs have an opportunity to become “anchor institutions” in the emerging informational ecosystem. Many schools have long embraced elements of this vision, but satisfying the information needs of communities will require schools to take on all the challenges of engaging as serious and valuable producers of meaningful journalism.

Read the full post at the New America Foundation website

Below is an infographic created by Shep McAllister at HackCollege on how college students are using their phones and smartphones. It’s evident how much mobile technology is a part of their lives. Luckily, using a phone to cheat on an exam is rare, according to the survey.

Created by: HackCollege

On the London School of Economics and Political Science blog, Charlie Beckett asks the question of whether or not journalism students should be taught to be more like Julian Assange. He makes the argument that they should. He said at the beginning of his post:

“Imagine Julian Assange ran a journalism school. Why not? He’s created one of the world’s biggest media brands on a tiny budget. It’s produced some of the most extraordinary pieces of journalism in the digital era and he’s worked with all the big names. If you judge journalism by how much the people in power hate you, then he scores A*.

I think we can all learn from WikiLeaks.

Later in the post he goes on to say:

“What made WikiLeaks work was Assange’s ideological drive and his all-consuming desire to use digital communications as a political weapon. He spotted a new business model and a novel kind of platform.”

His argument is that students should learn not only what their mainstream media bosses want, but also learn new and “disruptive” ideas.

Read the full post at LSE

Requests to Google to remove videos of police brutality on YouTube have been denied. Google, who decides what to take down on a case by case basis, said in its mid-year transparency report,

“We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests.”

You can read more about this on ReadWriteWeb

Credit: New York Times

A recent Pew Research Center study showed that tablet users are consuming more news than they did before they owned a tablet. Although this is a good thing for news companies, the study also shows that users are getting the news primarily from the web (or a combination of the web and an app) instead of from the mobile apps alone. With many news agencies investing time and money into mobile apps, this report may help direct future mobile decisions for news organizations.

PaidContent had this to say about this study:

According to the report, 30 percent are spending more time with the news than before they had a tablet, and one-third are seeking out new news organizations on their tablets they didn’t frequent on their computers or televisions.

That probably all sounds pretty good to a news industry that is looking for any semblance of a spark from the rise of tablets as an alternative to print. But unfortunately for those who have invested heavily in applications as their news-delivery strategy on tablets, 40 percent of those who read news on their tablets at least once a week are getting that news through their browser. An additional 31 percent say they use a combination of the browser and apps, while just 21 percent said they primarily use apps to get their news.

You can read the full blog post on PaidContent here

From the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, October 25, 2011 

Eighteen months after the introduction of the iPad, 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day, and they read long articles as well as get headlines. But a majority says they would not be willing to pay for news content on these devices, according to the most detailed study to date of tablet users and how they interact with this new technology.

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group, finds that the vast majority of tablet owners-fully 77%-use their tablet every day. They spend an average of about 90 minutes on them.

Consuming news (everything from the latest headlines to in-depth articles and commentary) ranks as one of the most popular activities on the tablet, about as popular as sending and receiving email (54% email daily on their tablet), and more popular than social networking (39%), gaming (30%), reading books (17%) or watching movies and videos (13%). The only activity that people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the web generally (67%).

Read the full article and learn more about the study here

The Renaissance Journalism Center has set up a resource website for nonprofits and ethnic and community news organizations.

From the website:

This curated collection of online tools, tutorials and resources is designed to help nonprofits and ethnic and community news organizations navigate the often intimidating and ever-evolving new media landscape. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, you will find valuable information on the technologies and best practices you need to tell a community’s stories in compelling ways; engage new audiences; optimize your website; and measure online impact.

You can visit the site here

By Mayur Patel and Michele McLellan on Knight Foundation

In the emerging landscape of non-profit news, good journalism is not enough. Even with generous foundation support, high-quality reporting alone will not create an organization that can sustain its ability to produce news in the public interest.

Instead, successful news organizations – even the nonprofit ones  - have to act like digital businesses, making revenue experimentation, entrepreneurship and community engagement important pieces of the mix. Understanding how to create social and economic value and how to adapt and innovate are just as important as good content.

The new study we just completed, “Getting Local,” offers a detailed look at some of the country’s leading online local nonprofit news ventures, providing data on how they are generating revenue, engaging users and cultivating donors.

It also offers a useful way for foundations and others interested in supporting nonprofit news to think about and assess the sustainability of these types of emerging organizations.

Read the full article and download the study on the Knight Foundation website

By Heather Ford (Bio) on PBS, October 20, 2011

Wikipedia articles on breaking news stories dominate page views on the world’s sixth-largest website. Perhaps more importantly, these articles drive the most significant editor contribution — especially among new editors.

In the first three months of this year, English Wikipedia articles with the most contributors were the 2011 Tucson shooting, the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami articles with 460, 405 and 785 editors contributing to the growth of the article respectively.

Interestingly, a number of Wikipedia policies discourage writing articles on breaking news. One of Wikipedia’s 42 policies, titled “What Wikipedia is not” (or WP:NOT), highlights that the site is, above all, an encyclopedia, not a newspaper (Wikipedia:NotNewspaper). The policy states that although the encyclopedia needs to include current and up-to-date information as well as standalone articles on “significant current events,” not all verifiable events are suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia.

Read the full article on PBS

From  Bill Mitchell on Poynter, Oct. 19, 2011 

For media executives awaiting reassuring evidence before experimenting with digital subscriptions, the time has arrived.

Simply put, their more adventurous colleagues at other companies have discovered multiple paths around the biggest risk attached to the pursuit of subscription revenue: diminished audience reach.

Here’s how they’ve navigating that tricky challenge:

• They’ve adjusted their paywall meters to permit whatever number of monthly free visits makes the most sense in their balance of reach and revenue. The trend, by the way, is definitely toward leaky walls rather than hard ones.
• They’ve recognized that, financially, their sites could afford to lose substantial traffic because their “sell-through” of online ads rarely approached their inventory anyway.
• They’ve made smart decisions, journalistically, about what content should remain outside the wall.

A new study by the BBC and Starcom MediaVest showed that tablet users spend more time consuming news than did previously.

Jeff Sonderman from Poynter said,

The results overall are encouraging for publishers hoping that iPads and other emerging tablets will play an important role in their digital futures. Among the most interesting findings:

- 63 percent of people said tablets lead them to rely more on traditional news providers and less on news aggregators.

- Tablets enhance the appetite for news. Fifty-nine percent said they access national or local news more often since they got a tablet. Seventy-eight percent said they follow a larger volume of news stories, and a greater variety of topics than before.

By Larry Kilman on WAN-IFRA, Oct. 12, 2011

By Eric Newton on Nieman Lab, Oct. 13, 2011

Everyone knows the news about the news. A once-in-a-generation media policy report for the Federal Communications Commission — The Information Needs of Communities, released this summer — made things abundantly clear. It detailed the decline of “local accountability journalism.” The evidence: 15,000 journalism jobs lost in the past few years, the lion’s share at daily newspapers. It’s a paradox of the digital age: More information than ever, but less local watchdog journalism. The same communications revolution that makes everyone a potential journalist has at the same time maimed America’s heavily advertising-based method of paying for professional journalism.

The nation’s institutions of higher learning have an important role to play in the local news crisis. In August, at the annual convention of the Association for Journalism and Mass Communication Educators in St. Louis, universities showed they are increasingly getting into local journalism. This is good news. Watchdog journalism is the “security camera” that keeps the powerful honest. Without it, government corruption always increases. The story of Bell, California, a town too small for a daily newspaper, where officials raided the city coffers to pay themselves six-figure salaries, is proof enough that a decline of local news is not without dire consequences.

Can journalism education really play a major role in local news flows? Teaching hospitals are some of our best medical institutions. Legal clinics at law schools take on major cases. And a new Harvard report, on the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, shows that journalism schools can do it, too. Long thought to be the caboose on the train of American journalism, they can instead be engines of change that drive news agendas.

Read the full article on Nieman Lab

As sales of tablet computers and smartphones increase, the PC will soon be overshadowed by a mobile world. The Economist posted an article earlier this week about the rise of mobile devices and said this,

Sales of tablet computers, though still small, are also growing rapidly. Since Apple’s iPad arrived last year, a host of rivals have appeared, such as RIM’s Playbook, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Sony’s Tablet. All eyes are now on Amazon’s Kindle Fire. With smartphones, which seem to be surgically attached to the hand of every teenager and many an adult, tablets have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those of personal computers (PCs).

Read the full article on The Economist

By  Miguel Paz (Bio) on PBD Media Shift Idea Lab, October 6, 2011

In Santiago, Chile, more than 60 percent of the poorest citizens don’t have access to the Internet. In the rest of the country, that number increases to 80 percent, and in rural areas, an Internet connection is almost nonexistent. But there are more than 20 million mobile phones in the nation, according to the latest survey by the Undersecretary of Telecommunications. (That’s actually around 1.15 cell phones per capita in a nation of 17,094,270 people.) And in rural areas, cell phones are king.

As Knight News Challenge winners FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi and NextDrop have shown, mobile communications are crucial for citizens living in rural areas, where being able to reach other people and access relevant news and public services information make a huge improvement in people’s lives. Plus, cell phones are tools that most already have.

What if, apart from efforts to widen connectivity in isolated areas and government programs to provide computers for schools in rural areas (which has been a very good, but slow, undertaking, and not an attractive business for telecom companies), governments of underdeveloped countries create and provide easy ways to access public information and services on mobile phones with an application or open-source web app that could be downloaded from government websites (in Chile it’s Gob.cl)? Or cellular service providers could pre-install an app or direct access to a web app on every smartphone or other devices?

This could mean a great deal for people, particularly in rural and impoverished areas where the biggest news is not what’s happening in Congress or the presidential palace, but what is happening to you and your community (something Facebook understood very well in its latest change that challenges the notion of what is newsworthy – but that’s a topic for a separate post).

People could do things like schedule a doctor’s appointment or receive notice that a doctor won’t be available; find out about grants to improve water conditions in their sector; receive direct information about training programs for growing organic food and the market prices for products they might sell; find out how their kids are doing in a school they attend in the city or if the rural bus system will go this week to the nearest town or not. These are just a few very straightforward examples of useful public services information that could be available on people’s phones. Such availability of information could save time and money for those who lack both things.

Read the full article on MediaShift Idea Lab

By Laura Hazard Owen on PaidContent, Oct. 11, 2011

Students work for their college newspapers for all sorts of reasons—and while college papers are sheltered from the harsh realities facing national and local newspapers in many ways, it’s probably never too early for a crash course in revenue models. Hence the new collaboration between digital subscription company Press+ and the Knight Foundation: Starting today, the first 50 college newspapers to sign up with Press+ will be able to install free meters on their websites, allowing them to collect donations and subscription fees from readers.

Press+, which is owned by RR Donnelley (NSDQ: RRD) and already operates metered paywalls for “grownup” newspapers like the Baltimore Sunand many MediaNews Group and Lee papers, says it is “providing students with a sustainable way to target parents, alumni, and other engaged readers for donations or subscriptions.

Read the full post on PaidContent

From Ryan Chittum at CJR, Oct. 11, 2011

Story length in journalism by itself doesn’t mean much. We read too many news stories that are just too damned long.

But, on the other hand, without going long, it’s hard to achieve greatness. It sure makes harder to tell a story or lay out evidence, much less capture nuance and complexity. A longer story signals to readers that this story is important and that more work went into it.

This is to say that your average 4,000 word piece is just going to be reported more deeply and edited more heavily than your average 400-word FT news story, say. It’s possible there’s a great business journalism haiku poet out there, I suppose. Let us know if you spot one.

The Wall Street Journal’s page one has long been the standard-bearer for business writing and reporting, at least for newspapers. It took news and turned it into narrative nonfiction, everyday, twice a day, for decades. But Rupert Murdoch made it no secret that he disdained the Journal’s page-one tradition of long-form journalism, and it’s been de-emphasized under his ownership. That’s our qualitative impression, anyway, based on reading the paper, following the tealeaves, and talking to former colleagues.

Number of A1 stories longer than 1,500 words in the last decade. From CJR

Read the full article on CJR

From Steve Myers on Poynter, Oct. 7, 2011

Recent news events from Joplin to Tripoli have provided plenty of examples of how news has become a real-time experience, something you observe and discuss as it’s happening rather than waiting hours or days to watch or read.

You may have lost the weekend of August 20 to Andy Carvin’s furious chronicling of the fall of Tripoli. Perhaps you followed along with Brian Stelter as he tweeted his observations and photos of the devastation left by the tornado in Joplin, Mo. Maybe you watched the minute-by-minute drama leading up to the execution of Troy Davis, or read tweets about the East Coast earthquake before you felt it. Earlier this week, it was the helicopter crash in the East River.

Such examples prompted Jeff Jarvis to wonder whether articles sometimes are just byproducts. If we can wade in the stream, what’s the point of a wrap-up article?

Perhaps it is unnecessary for the leading edge of news consumers – news junkies and people in the news industry. But the vast majority of people – anyone whose eyes aren’t locked on a smart phone or laptop screen – still desire for their news to be packaged in some way so they can make sense of what they missed.

Read the full post on Poynter 

At the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Seth Meyers poked fun at the notion that bloggers take stories from traditional news media sources. He was giving the audience a mock rundown of the after-parties when he hit on something that research has confirmed.

Meyers joked, “The New York Times party used to be free, but tonight there’s a cover, so like everyone else I’ll probably just go to the Huffington Post party. And the Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first and just steal food and drinks and bring it from there.”

The truth in Meyers’ joke is that blogs do tend to use stories from other traditional media outlets, like The New York Times. And the newspaper used most, according to a study published recently in Newspaper Research Journal is The Washington Post.

Marcus Messner, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Bruce Garrison, a professor at the University of Miami, studied the relationship between political bloggers and elite traditional news media and found both bloggers and elite media rely on each other to some degree rather than on original reporting. While traditional news media are the dominant sources for bloggers, blogs compete with many other sources in shaping traditional news media agendas.

The top-ten rankings for most cited media by blogs in the findings included:

1. 1. The Washington Post
2. 2. CNN
3. 3. NBC News
4. 4. The New York Times
5. 5. ABC News
6. 6. Fox News
7. 7. Los Angeles Times
8. 8. USA Today
9. 9. CBS News
10. 10. Christian Science Monitor

The findings are limited to the popular blogs used in the study. The liberal filter blogs were DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, Eschanton, Crooks and Liars, and Think Progress. The conservative filter blogs were Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Powerline, and Quarters.

The study was published in the summer 2011 issue of Newspaper Research Journal.

Contacts: Sandra H. Utt Cell: (901) 628-2553 e-mail: nrj@newspaperresearchjournal.org or Elinor Kelley Grusin e-mail: egrusin@memphis.edu

• Download “Study Shows Some Blogs Affect Traditional News Media Agendas” by Marcus Messner and Bruce Garrison

By Troy Thibodeaux on Poynter, Oct. 6, 2011 

Data journalist. Computer-assisted reporter. Newsroom developer. Journo-geek. If those of us who work in the field aren’t quite sure what to call ourselves, it’s little wonder that sometimes even the people who work beside us are puzzled by what we do. Part of the confusion (and one reason for all the competing labels) lies in the sheer variety of tasks that can fall under this heading. We may be fairly sure that some jobs lie within the boundaries of data journalism, but we’d be hard-pressed to say what can’t be jumbled into this baggy monster of a field.

In its current state, data journalism describes neither a beat nor a particular medium (unlike photo journalism or video journalism), but rather an overlapping set of competencies drawn from disparate fields. We have the statistical methods of social scientists, the mapping tools of GIS, the visualization arts of statistics and graphic design, and a host of skills that have their own job descriptions and promotion tracks among computer scientists: Web development, general-purpose programming, database administration, systems engineering, data mining (even, I hear, cryptography). And the ends of these efforts vary as widely as their means: from the more traditional text CAR story to the interactive graphic or app; from newsroom tools built for reporters to multi-faceted websites in which the reporting becomes the data.

Read the full article on Poynter

By Elvina Nawaguna-Clemente / Cronkite News Service, October 4, 2011 –

PHOENIX — Investigative journalism is on life support, real news is increasingly replaced with fluff and democracy is suffering because of it, a Federal Communications Commission member said Monday.

“Hundreds of newsrooms have been shuttered, thousands of reporters walk the streets in search of a job rather than walk the beat in search of a story,” Michael Copps said at a public hearing on the FCC’s report on media in the digital age.

His comments preceded three panels discussing the report’s recommendations at a session hosted by Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Copps, one of five FCC commissioners, said thorough reporting has been sacrificed as news organizations struggle to deliver greater returns to shareholders.

Read the full article on the Boston Herald

By Eugenia Chien on Poynter, Oct. 3 , 2011 – For the last three years, I’ve been running the website Muni Diaries, where public transit riders in San Francisco submit stories that happened on the bus. Along the way, we have been approached by several large news organizations for content partnerships. This has become more and more common, as many news organizations don’t have the staff or resources to cover hyperlocal news quickly and adequately anymore.

We’re grateful that our successes have led to partnerships, but I also recall many meetings where both bloggers and media organizations have left frustrated because of misunderstandings and mismatched expectations. Based on my experiences, I’ve come up with some tips on how news organizations can create meaningful collaborations with local blogs.

1. Ask your local blogs what they need.

2. Be prepared to show specific mockups and plans.

3. Understand the business of the Web.

4. Get support from your advertising and marketing departments.

Read the full post on Poynter

From Jason Stverak on OJR, Sept. 29, 2011 – Last month, a federal court ruled that recording public officials, including police officers, is protected by the First Amendment. This decision, which may outrage law enforcement officials and members of Congress, is one of the first federal court decisions that brings the First Amendment into the Internet age.

This case emerged from an incident where a private citizen used his personal cell phone to capture alleged police brutality.

Simon Glik could have walked away when he saw two police officers punching a man in the face. Instead, he pulled out his cellphone and started recording it. When Mr. Glik informed the police officers that he was recording audio, the officer arrested him for violating the state’s wiretap law. He also was charged with disturbing the peace and aiding the escape of a prisoner. The charges were dropped eventually because of lack of merit, but Mr. Glik filed a lawsuit claiming his free-speech rights had been violated.

This latest ruling is especially relevant to those who consider themselves citizen journalists. Before the court’s decision, members of the general public did not have the legal protection guaranteed by state shield laws enjoyed by credentialed journalists.

Read the full article on OJR

By Jacqueline Marino and Jeremy Gilbert on Nieman Reports, Sept. 12, 2011 – It used to be that calling a journalist a “hack” was considered an insult. Now, tack on “-er” and more than likely the reporter will be flattered. Today tech-savvy journalists are mapping stories, figuring out new ways to share mobile-based news, and changing how investigative reporters gather and analyze their information. This expanding digital landscape for news, especially the significance of data and the promise of mobile, means that computer programming is becoming yet another skill to be taught in journalism classes.

The key question is how to teach these skills in the context of journalism. Who should learn the technical skills of a hacker? What skills do journalists need to master? How do we partner those who are tech savvy with those eager to learn reporting? Experiments abound—from computer science/journalism master’s programs to scattered courses in “multimedia programming”—and no one has figured out yet what works best.

As professors at different journalism schools and with varied backgrounds, each of us has taught in classrooms with a mix of computer science and journalism students, who have collaborated in learning how to dig into data in educational environments long dominated by story. Here, we tell how we did it, what we’ve learned so far, and where we’re headed.

Read the full post on Nieman Reports

The 2012 AEJMC conference holds great promise as we celebrate the organization’s centennial anniversary. The Chicago conference is expected to draw a large number of participants including many first time conference attendees.

For many first time conference participants, the experience may seem overwhelming at times. Some people may be unclear what a poster session is and how it may be different than a scholar to scholar session (it is not). Many are not sure about which social they may attend and what the best strategies are for meeting new people.

During the 2011 conference in Saint Louis, the membership committee of AEJMC decided to establish an exciting new mentorship program that aims to welcome and acclimate first time conference attendees.

The idea behind the mentorship program is to match veteran conference goers with first time attendees. We hope that as a mentor, you will help introduce the newcomers to the conference, explain some of the key concepts and help them find their way around by introducing them to other members.

If you would like to serve as a mentor, please email the membership chair of the division or interest group that you are most active in. We will ask the membership chairs to help us with the matching process.

If you have any questions about the mentorship program or would like more information, please feel free to email me at gjgolan@syr.edu or any of the other membership committee members.

We are all very excited about the mentorship program and we hope that you will participate in it.

Sincerely,

Guy J. Golan
AEJMC, Membership Committee Chair
Syracuse University

By Jeff Sonderman on Poynter, Sept. 29 , 2011 – Facebook again may have gone too far in its quest to make privacy obsolete, and this time some news organizations could get burned by going along with it.

Facebook spent years making it easier for us to share by building its network and placing “Like” buttons across the Web. Its latest idea goes much further, turning sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.

Encouraging sharing is great. Making sharing easier is even better. But this is much more than that. What Facebook has done is change the definition of “sharing.” It’s the difference between telling a friend about something that happened to you today and opening your entire diary.

News organizations and other content companies are eagerly accompanying Facebook down this path.

New Facebook-based apps like Washington Post Social Reader, and similar ones from The Guardian, The Daily and The Wall Street Journal, encourage Facebook users to read their stories and pump all that reading activity out to their friends.

And this isn’t isolated to what you read via Facebook itself. Yahoo News is asking readers to sign up to have their reading activity streamed to their Facebook profile. Services like Spotify and Netflix have their own apps to automatically share all media consumption.

This so-called “frictionless sharing” has big problems.

Read the full article on Poynter

By James Rainey on Latimes.com, Sept. 28, 2011 – Want to get under a newspaper person’s skin? Tell them you don’t need their work because you get most of your news from the Internet.

Inky survivors can’t stand to hear that because they know that — technological advances and upstart websites notwithstanding — the bulk of news on the Web actually still originates with newspaper reporters.

But it turns out that the audience doesn’t merely fail to recognize who produces most local news. Even those who do give credit to their local paper don’t express particular concern about finding an alternative if their paper goes away, a new and detailed survey of community news consumption habits shows.

Americans turn to their newspapers (and attendant websites) on more topics than any other local news source, according to a survey released this week by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. But, despite their own reading habits, more than two-thirds told pollsters that if their hometown paper disappeared, it would not seriously hurt their ability to keep up with the news.

Read the full article on the LA Times

From the Pew Internet Research site, Sept. 26, 2011 – Citizens’ media habits are surprisingly varied as newspapers, TV, the internet, newsletters, and old-fashioned word-of-mouth compete for attention. Different platforms serve different audience needs. A detailed and interactive chart spelling out which local information sources people rely on for different topics is available here.

About the Study
The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from January 12 to 25, 2011, among a sample of 2,251 adults, age 18 and older. Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,501) and cell phone (750, including 332 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

Go to the Pew site to view the study or to download it

By Jay Dunn on Social Media Today, Sept. 23 – People are spending more time inside mobile applications on average than they are on the web, according to an analysis from Flurry, a mobile analytics firm.

Flurry measures the time people spend in apps through its own direct analytics. It got numbers for the web using public data from comScore and Alexa. The analysis is somewhat imperfect, but even if you judge it solely on a directional basis you can see mobile apps are consuming more and more time.

So what are people doing in those apps? Gaming and social networking, which absorb 79% of people’s time, according to Flurry. The rest is news, entertainment, and other apps.

Read the full post of Social media Today

From the Knight Foundation website: MIAMI, (Sept. 16, 2011) – While social media have been blamed for teen ills from narcissism to cyberbullying, a new study offers an inspiring perspective: as social media use has grown in the United States, so has students’ appreciation for the First Amendment. The national study was released today to coincide with the celebration of Constitution Day. It was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The national study was released today to coincide with the celebration of Constitution Day. It was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“This is the first generation in history that can text, tweet and blog to the whole world – it’s great news that their support is growing for the freedoms that let them do it,” said Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president of Knight Foundation. “But the bad news is that teachers aren’t nearly as excited as students about social media or student freedom.”

The Future of the First Amendment study found:

• Both social media use and First Amendment appreciation are growing among high school students. More than three-quarters of students use social media several times a week to get news and information. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who believe “the First Amendment goes too far” in protecting the rights of citizens has dropped to a quarter (24 percent) in 2011 from nearly half (45 percent) in 2006.
• There is a clear, positive relationship between social media use and appreciation of the First Amendment. Fully 91 percent of students who use social networking daily to get news and information agree that “people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions.” But only 77 percent of those who never use social networks to get news agree that unpopular opinions should be allowed.
• Still, many teachers believe social media harms education. Most teachers also do not support free expression for students. Only 35 percent, for example, agree that “high school students should be allowed to report controversial issues in their student newspapers without the approval of school authorities.” In addition, teachers are more inclined to think that the emergence of the newest forms of digital media have harmed (49 percent) rather than helped (39 percent) student learning.

“For many, the First Amendment is an abstract concept, but this new study tells us that social media bring the importance of free speech home to young Americans,” said Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center. “The vibrancy of worldwide communications today, fueled by social media and engaged users, is in effect exporting First Amendment values to a new and global generation.”

The study, conducted through interviews with 12,090 students and 900 teachers nationwide, was written by Dr. Kenneth Dautrich, a senior researcher at The Pert Group. It is the fourth Future of the First Amendment study done by Dr. Dautrich for Knight Foundation since 2004.

Madison Davis, a senior at Branham High School in San Jose, Calif. who took the survey, says she thinks using Facebook several times a day has given her a greater appreciation for the First Amendment and freedom of expression.

“It has taught us early on that we have a right to say whatever we want without worrying,” Madison said. “Because we have an easier outlet to express our views, we’re more likely to. All it takes is going online and typing in a post and we’ve already expressed ourselves to 400 plus people.”

Alexander Richter, a senior at Branham Senior High School, says expressing himself on social media makes him more likely to do the same in person.

“If you can go on Facebook and easily post your opinion, you appreciate your rights to do it in a protest or outside of the Internet more,” Alexander said. He recently found himself arguing online over national economic recovery plans, and felt more confident to make his case the next day in school.

“I knew what I wanted to say, I was prepared to say it, and I was already attached to the issue because of Facebook.”

As a response to the survey findings, Knight Foundation and the First Amendment Center will release a teachers’ guide to social media and the First Amendment as a way to foster discussion and appreciation for both. The guide will be unveiled at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Dec 15, in celebration of the Bill of Rights’ birthday.

For more information about activities celebrating the First Amendment, follow the First Amendment Center’s 1 for All campaign on Twitter @1forAllus.

For more on the Future of the First Amendment Survey, visit knightfoundation.org.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit KnightFoundation.org.

###

Contacts:

Marc Fest, Vice President/Communications, (305) 908-2677, fest@knightfoundation.org

See also previous years of FoFA research: 2007 Report | 2006 Report | 2004 Report.

Read the article on the Knight Foundation website

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is proud to honor Dr. Sharon Dunwoody, University of Wisconsin-Madison, with the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research.

Dr. Dunwoody received the award at the AEJMC annual conference in St. Louis in August. The award is named in honor of Paul J. Deutschmann who played a pivotal role in the movement to study journalism and mass communication scientifically. Dunwoody is the first female recipient of the award.

Dr. Dunwoody is faculty affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author/coauthor of more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and has authored/edited five books.  She is a former president of AEJMC, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, and the Society for Risk Analysis. Dunwoody is also the chair-elect of the AAAS Section on General Interest in Science and Technology.

Dr. Dunwoody earned a BA in journalism at Indiana University, her MA in mass communication from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University.

About the Paul J. Deutschmann Award
This non-annual award is named in honor of Paul J. Deutschmann, who was a central force in the movement to study journalism and mass communication scientifically. He helped establish and develop the College of Communication Arts at Michigan State University, and served as director of its Communications Research Center. This award is presented by the AEJMC Elected Standing Committee on Research.

About AEJMC
AEJMC is a nonprofit, educational association of some 3,700 journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals from across the globe. The Association’s mission is to advance education in journalism and mass communication to the end of achieving better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding. For more about AEJMC visit www.AEJMC.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is proud to award the 2011 AEJMC Equity and Diversity Award to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University.

The AEJMC Equity & Diversity Award recognizes outstanding progress and innovation in racial, gender, and ethnic equity and diversity. Nominations outline a program’s efforts over the previous three years in hiring and recruitment, status of current faculty, academic climate and institutionally embedded support.

One of the School’s main diversity programs called The Center, or El Centro, was developed in response the growing Latino population and Latino-oriented media in the United States. The Center “generates research and knowledge about Latino-oriented media, markets, and the new multicultural America” and aims “to be the driving engine of a series of complementary activities that enhance the academic, professional, and business opportunities related to Latino-oriented media and Latino markets,” according to its website.

Dr. Federico Subervi, Director of The Center, said that recognition from the award is part of a “team effort” that reflects the spirit of the entire school.

“This award is demonstrable – and powerful – evidence of the positive effect of having made the investment in the Latinos & Media Markets Center,” says Dr. Tom Grimes, a journalism and mass communication professor at Texas State. “The Center is well known nationally. I hear about it a lot from colleagues at other places. Clearly its gravitational force had a lot to do with this.”

The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University is accredited by ACEJMC and is one of the largest journalism and mass communication programs in the state of Texas – and the nation.

Recognition of the award was given at the 2011 AEJMC Conference in St. Louis. A second presentation will take place at the Texas State University later in the academic year. The AEJMC President will travel to Texas State University to present the award in a ceremony honoring the school’s outstanding achievements in equity and diversity.

About Texas State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication
The Texas State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication offers a nationally accredited curriculum that introduces students to the broad framework of mass communication, emphasizing what is common and fundamental to advertising, print journalism, public relations and the electronic media. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication commits itself to the preparation of mass media professionals in advertising, print, the electronic media and public relations. For more information about the Texas State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication visit www.masscomm.txstate.edu.

About AEJMC
AEJMC is a nonprofit, educational association of some 3,700 journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals from across the globe. The Association’s mission is to advance education in journalism and mass communication to the end of achieving better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding. For more about AEJMC visit www.AEJMC.org.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Dr. Barbie Zelizer was announced as the winner of the AEJMC Tankard Book Award at the 2011 AEJMC Conference in St. Louis. Dr. Zelizer is a Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, holds the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and is the Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. Zelizer earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MA and BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The book is published by The Oxford University Press, which describes Zelizer’s book saying, “Tracking events as wide-ranging as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and 9/11, Barbie Zelizer demonstrates that modes of journalistic depiction and the power of the image are immense cultural forces that are still far from understood.”

An Austin Chronicle review of About to Die says, “[About to Die] is an audacious and often chilling examination of how visual media handle the moment of death, from engravings of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the Pacific tsunami of 2004. With an obvious and admitted debt to the academy’s favorite photography buff Susan Sontag, Zelizer treats these images as both rare and powerful.”

About the Tankard Book Award
The Standing Committee on Research administers the Tankard Book Award competition for AEJMC. Authors who are AEJMC members may self-nominate any first-edition scholarly monograph, edited collection, or textbook published the current year of call that is relevant to journalism and mass communication. Nominated books can be co-authored or co-edited, and must be well-written and break new ground.

About AEJMC
AEJMC is a nonprofit, educational association of some 3,700 journalism and mass communication educators, students, and media professionals from across the globe. The Association’s mission is to advance education in journalism and mass communication to the end of achieving better professional practice, a better informed public, and wider human understanding. For more about AEJMC visit www.AEJMC.org.

By Chris Ariens on TVNewser, Sept. 20, 2011 – The three network evening newscasts have been in a downward trend since the days of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. But for the first time since the 2001-02 season, all the three evening newscasts saw an increase in Total Viewers year-over-year.

Compared to the 2009-2010 season during the just completed 2010-11 season:

• NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams is up +2.7%

• ABC World News with Diane Sawyer is up +3.3%

• CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley is up +2.7%

Read the full article on TVNewser

By Jeff Bercovici on Forbes, Sept. 19 – Is Facebook a friend of news companies, or is it a rival? No matter how much success publishers have piggybacking off its traffic, they can’t escape the cruel math: The more of their time consumers spend on Facebook and other social networking hubs, the less they have left over for news sites.

Now The Wall Street Journal has what it thinks is an answer to this problem. Called WSJ Social, it filters Journal content through the so-called social graph to yield a news product that lives entirely within the walls of Facebook. It launches Tuesday. Here’s what it looks like:

Photo Credit: Forbes

“The fundamental idea of it is super simple,” says Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network. “It’s about making [WSJ content] available where people are.”

Read the full article on Forbes

The new mobile initiative, dubbed “iCircular,” will start rolling out on Monday within the mobile sites and apps of the 40 newspapers.

The iCircular feature will be found within newspaper mobile apps on the iPhone. The feature will be available on other formats, such as Google’s Android, later on. It’s HTM5-based, so that will also be available on newspapers’ web and mobile wap sites and ultimately ease iCircular’s transfer to other operating systems. The app will be situated within a special “Deals” section on each of the newspapers’ apps and mobile sites.

Read the full article on Paid Content

By Mathew Ingram on Gigaom, Sept. 14, 2011 – As reported in a number of places, Walmart has acquired OneRiot: a startup that originally tried to do social search before pivoting to focus on social advertising. OneRiot joins a unit called Walmart Labs, which the giant retailer created earlier this year with the acquisition of a company called Kosmix. Why should media companies (or anyone else, for that matter) find this interesting? Because what drove Walmart to make these acquisitions and create Walmart Labs is the same thing that plenty of other companies, and particularly media entities, should be interested in: making sense of all the data coming in from users on social networks and their sharing activity.

Making sense of the social-network firehose
As Rajaraman told me when I interviewed him at the Disrupt conference last year, where Tweetbeat was launched (a video clip from our interview is embedded below): “It was like we were waiting for this real-time data flow to come along so we could apply our semantic filter to it.” An understanding of how to filter those billions of tweets using semantic tools and a “taxonomy” or structured view of online data allowed Tweetbeat to generate customized views of the content being posted to Twitter in real time. In one of its first offerings, Tweetbeat let users follow not just information about the World Cup, but tweets and links about individual players, teams and countries.

Obviously, that kind of real-time filtering and analysis of activity can be applied to far more than just showing which soccer team is the most popular, and Walmart’s purchase of Kosmix showed Walmart is clearly interested in the potential of using these techniques to understand its customers and its market. The addition of OneRiot adds an advertising-related aspect to Walmart’s approach, which could help the retailer understand more about what drives users to click or interact with ads and ad-related content on social networks.

Read the full article on Gigaom

By Karmah Elmusa on Mother Jones, Sept. 15, 2011 – Whether they were covering the Alabama tornadoes in depth, pissing off James Franco, or exposing undercover drug busts, these campus newspapers boldly broke the news.

Watch This Space: In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business prof who’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. Te paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.

Eye on the Storm: The University of Alabama’s Crimson White provided real-time coverage of last spring’s tornadoes, offering eyewitness accounts and a photo slideshow to highlight the destruction.

Read the full post on Mother Jones

Nieman Reports has launched its Fall 2011 issue. This newsletter gives you links to our magazine’s sections through in the spotlight and to its articles in In This Issue. The website’s fellows & contributors highlight on-going work of journalists, and our links deliver you to other aspects of Nieman Reports’s outreach and endeavors. – Melissa Ludtke, Nieman Reports

View the Fall 2011 Issue

By Matthew Panzarino on TNW, Sept. 12, 2011 – Flipboard CEO Mike McCue is on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt conference right now and he is saying some interesting things about the future of the web and the iPad. “The web will feel a lot different in 5 years. It will feel a lot like print and be monetized differently than it is currently.” Update.

McCue also said, “I think that the iPad is a superior consumption device for content on the web. It is actually the perfect device for content on the web. We’re trying to create a new type of browsing experience that is right for the iPad.”

On The Daily and other products that offer media content directly on the iPad, McCue is optimistic. “I think that there will be an opportunity to create new kinds of content companies on the iPad.”

Read the full post on TNW