Your tech fee$ at work
- Posted by Robert Stewart in From the Front Office on 12/31/2008
During the winter break technology elves gave JSchool classrooms a much needed technology upgrade.
Using tech fee dollars that students pay each quarter, the school hired a university classroom technology crew to make Scripps Hall much "smarter." Here’s a list of what they did:
1. Anderson Auditorium got a new wide-screen projector, to go along with the summer ’08 upgrades that already had gone a long way toward improving the teaching and learning experience.
2. All other classrooms in Scripps Hall got iMacs and new podiums with loud speakers and laptop connections to go along with the VCR/DVD combo players (no more TV crash carts!). A bonus feature of the iMacs: built-cameras, allowing videoconferencing in any classroom in the building (using Skype, iChat, etc.).
3. Satellite TV is now "in the house," starting with the kiosk monitor in the main lobby (outside of Scripps 105 and 106). The TV screen on the kiosk now features several news and information programs available on the direcTV satellite network, including Democracy Now! (on the Link channel), Bloomberg TV, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC. The kiosk monitor is programmed to change channels automatically throughout the day, to provide students and other passers-by the chance to see a wide variety of programs.
Students and faculty who wish to make their own program selections can go to Lasher Learning Center, which now features the direcTV service and a comfortable group sitting area. Professors and student organizations using Scripps 111 can access the satellite service as well. Some of the channels included in the service:
BBC America
BET
Big Ten Network
Biography
Bloomberg Television
CCTV-9
CNBC
CNBC World
CNN
CNN Headline News
Comedy Central
C-SPAN
C-SPAN2
Current TV
Discovery Channel
Discovery Health
DIY Network
E! Entertainment Television
ESPN Classic
ESPN HD
ESPN2
ESPNEWS
ESPNU
FINE LIVING
FitTV
Food Network
Fox Business Network
Fox News Channel
Fox Reality
Fox Sports en Español
HGTV
History
History International
IFC
Link TV
MSNBC
NASA TV
National Geographic Channel
NBA TV
Science Channel
Superstation WGN
Travel Channel
The Weather Channel
Students and faculty are encouraged to stop by Lasher Learning Center to check out one or more of these channels.
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Can’t decide? Take this advice
- Posted by Robert Stewart in From the Front Office on 12/3/2008
So, you’re interested in journalism but you don’t quite know where you want to focus.
How about paying attention to our most recent group of top graduating seniors? After all, great students have something to teach all of us, whether we are their classmates, their professors, or perhaps a prospective student considering studying journalism at Ohio University.
Kirsten Brownrigg was voted the top 2008 graduating senior by the faculty of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.
During her time at OU Brownrigg produced "Good Neighbors, Bad Blood" for WOUB (see opening segment, right). The documentary examines the impact of C8, a chemical produced in the region.
In an interview, Brownrigg discusses the experiences she had as a journalism student at OU as well as her decision to select the Carr Van Anda program rather than one of the conventional sequences. Listen to a podcast of the interview.
This year each of our top graduating seniors in the six sequences sat down for an interview.
Ellen Cox, top graduating advertising journalism student. After graduating in June ’08 Cox started working at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York.
Jessica Reimers, top graduating broadcast journalism student.
Maria Gallucci, top graduating HTC journalism student. After graduation Gallucci completed an internship with the Associated Press in Mexico City.
Jen Ator, top graduating magazine student. After graduation Ator started working at Men’s Health magazine.
Matt Zapotosky, top graduating news writing and editing student. "Zap" started working at the Washington Post after graduation.
Meghan Louttit, top graduating online journalism student. Louttit started working for washingtonpost.com after graduation.
Courtney Cooper, top graduating public relations student.
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’A Blue Island in a Sea of Red,’ or, the Power of Images
- Posted by Bernhard Debatin in Dr. D’s HTC blog on 11/15/2008
- tags: HTC, news, online
During and after the elections, we’ve seen a lot of maps, and most often, they looked like this:
- or like this:
.
And for those, who did not get it from the picture, the title at the bottom reads: Athens County a blue island in a sea of red.
What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s put it this way: If you’d write the premises of this picture as an argument in a text, it would be called a faulty argument, a fallacy. Because you’d state that it is ok to represent the amount of elements in a given space by the size of this space, even though the size of the space has nothing to do with the amount of elements in it.
Complicated? Well, what it means is that we’ve become accustomed to accept a geographic representation of population numbers. If you look at an electoral map of Ohio or the US, you would think that it is almost impossible that the Democrats won the elections. Sure, we all know that population density matters. But the manifest message of all these territorial maps is different.
This is why some people have created population cartograms, in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population.
The site techpresident.com has a cool flash animated electoral map that morphes from territorial representation to an accurate electoral vote representation, which at the end looks like this:
.
(watch the animation here)
Mark Newman, a physicist from the University of Michigan, created an even cooler set of cartograms, which keep the overall landmass intact while representing the actual popular and electoral college votes. The popular vote map, for instance, looks like this:
Check out his cartograms at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/.
Why is this important? Because it’s a good example for how a particular perspective--in this case geo-territorial representation--creates an implicit argument, and with it: media bias.
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Is Aussie Journalism different from American Journalism?
- Posted by Yusuf Kalyango in Inside the IIJ on 11/13/2008
- tags: Compiled by Catherine Pearson in Australia
A former student of Dr. Kalyango’s International Issues Reporting class is in Australia on a one-year expedition. She compiles weekly musings about her expedition. In the following article, she compares journalism in Australia to American journalism.
By Catherine Pearson
In Australia
Someone told me before my trip to this land of wonders that Australia was not well-known for its journalism. Since I arrived here in August 2008, I’ve struggled to discern if there is a difference between Aussie journalism and other countries, or if it just differs from the journalism ideals I learned in graduate school in the United States. So, I was not sure how the Australian media editors would receive my idealistic notions of journalism. I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
During my first week in Australia I met a sailor, who was a fantastic subject for a profile story, which I pitched to a local paper, the Townsville Bulletin. The editor called me within ten minutes of emailing the final story. “It reminds me of why I have a good opinion of American journalism and American journalism schools,” he said. He spent the next ten minutes commending my approach to storytelling without an agenda. My other attempts at pitching stories were less than successful.
I’ve just moved to the oldest town in Queensland, population of fewer than 3,000. The editor for the Gayndah Gazette, which comes out fortnightly, smiled as she told me the stories were about “gos,” or gossip. I hoped the term lacked the negative connotation I attach to the sticky subject and concluded she meant happenings, such as births, weddings, and anniversaries. When I offered to write about them, she eagerly gave me my first assignment: introduce myself to the community. I’ve never imagined being the news in any land, but she found my presence noteworthy, and I’d rather tell folks about myself than make them gather their own gos.
I’m less of a novelty in the bigger cities, such as Brisbane, where news coverage is strikingly similar to many American cities. When I first caught myself humming along to the Channel 7 evening news intro, I realized some were more than similar; they were the same.
Unlike the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, I started in the U.S. and then went down under to try my hand at journalism. Well, that, and I am not a billionaire. Either way the plane flies, Murdoch’s media path has gone before me and left an ever-growing trail of familiar tunes and themes.
With that familiarity was the convenience of following the campaign trail for the U.S. presidential election. Albeit the footage is a bit grainy, and the snippets are brief considering the foregone conclusion that Senator Barack Obama had already been voted into office even before Election Day.
These updates usually come just before or after disastrous stock market news. A global economic crisis warrants coverage by anyone’s standards, and so I’ve seen, heard and read about Wall Street everywhere I’ve gone in Australia. This has led to lively conversations here about the basics of economics, CEOs and corporate greed. Other inquiries have been more personal. I’ve repeatedly gotten to reassure concerned Aussies that my family in Missouri was not directly in the path of any recent hurricanes.
And then there is “footy.” Football, rugby, and cricket have placed their "reserved" placard on the dining table of news, right next to weather. More often than not the players’ misbehavior dominates scores when it comes to airtime.
Coups and earthquakes tend to get attention, even if the battles are only on the ball field and the hail shakes farmers’ bank accounts more than their actual land. So, I suppose Australian news coverage adheres to the same criteria as elsewhere. And to this visiting American, the differences seem as minor as those of the language itself --- still English --- just with an accent.
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Memo to high school seniors
- Posted by Robert Stewart in From the Front Office on 11/10/2008
Next fall’s JSchool freshmen will differ from previous generations of first-year journalism students in one important respect: They’ll be "journalism" majors.
Let me explain.
In years past, journalism school applicants at OU were asked to indicate a sequence, e.g., advertising, broadcast news, magazine journalism, etc. Sequences have defined the JSchool in the 20+ years I’ve been on the faculty. Even to this day, most faculty members in the journalism school identify with one or perhaps two sequences. That’s likely going to change in the not-too-distant future.
Four years from now Ohio University will make the switch to semesters, so we all know that change is coming. This season of change is amplified by changes we see happening every day in a landscape of converging media, a landscape that begs the question: How much longer will sequences make sense?
Professionals in the field tell us that the future -- indeed, even the present -- demands of our graduates a more flexible skill set, and even more important, the ability to learn, adapt and re-tool. In the following video, Peter Copeland (Scripps Howard News Service) and David Keim (BSJ ’90, Knoxville News Sentinel) discuss the benefits of journalism education at Ohio University, as well as their take on the future:
As we begin laying the groundwork for our change to semesters, we’re already seeing an embrace of greater flexibility. For example, the faculty voted more than a year ago to infuse our existing sequences with greater choice. Through the advising process we encourage our students to take full advantage of an expanded menu of options, making it easier to acquire a wide variety of skills and ways of thinking.
Which takes me back to my opening comments about our incoming students in 2009. We want all incoming freshmen to think of themselves simply as journalism students when they enter our program. During their first quarter on campus they’ll take "Journalism & Society" (JOUR 101), saturating them with information about the changing world of media, the opportunities and growth areas, as well as the wide variety of invaluable hands-on opportunities and student professional organizations available on campus. Then, and only then, will they select a sequence that makes sense to them.
Students wishing to break out of the remaining vestiges of convention can apply for the Carr Van Anda, which allows third-year students who have maintained a minimum GPA of 3.0 the option of creating their own sequence. The student’s adviser and the director of the JSchool have to sign off on the program to make sure it is coherent and meaningful. But I can assure you that we’re doing far more to bring the CVA option to our students’ attention than was done in the past, simply because we see the great value it offers in injecting flexibility into our existing curriculum.
Even with all of this change, we continue to be committed to providing a relevant curriculum as well as the learning experiences needed to get a job in the field of journalism. These opportunities are available in abundance on campus, as well as through internships. Both are needed more than ever, to ensure that our students are ready for whatever happens in the field of journalism.
NOTE: Jen Evans, Andy Kane, and Angie Weaver wrote in the 2008 edition of our alumni magazine, The Ohio Journalist, a cover story exactly on this topic. I recommend "The Challenge of Change" to all students applying for admission to
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CJ and the Jena 6
- Posted by Bill Reader in Community Journalism on 11/5/2008
- tags: cj
One reason community journalism tends to fly under the radar of media watchers (including many in journalism education) is because the work is intensely localized. A simple example can be found every election day - community media often report on the outcome of local races (county offices, town council, school boards) that would be of little interest to people not living in those localities. Rarely does a story published in a community medium get picked up by regional, national or international news media.
An example of a local story that did make national news is the infamous "Jena 6" story a few years ago in Jena, Louisiana, involving racial tensions, intimidation, and violence at the local high school. Once the story "went national," the issue of racial tensions in tiny Jena (pop. about 3,000) was featured in such prominent media as National Public Radio and the BBC. A march in September 2007 by about 20,000 people put even more attention on the small town in central Louisiana.
The most recent issue of SPJ’s Quill magazine puts the spotlight on the problems two local journalists faced in covering the issue for their communities. The accounts of those two young reporters - one for a local newspaper, the other for a local TV station - provide a small glimpse of the issues community journalists can face when locally bad news makes national headlines.
Among some of the problems they faced: National network news stations use video from the local station but don’t give credit; national reporters pumping local reporters for info while the local reporters were trying to do their own jobs; and bitter resentment toward "the media" in the little town where those local reporters have to work. One reporter claims to have received death threats, dead animals placed in her car, and a noose hung from her door.
That one case illustrates an important dynamic in the relationships between the vast majority of professional journalists who work for community media and the high-profile minority who work for national media. Large media are prone to "parachute journalism," in which they swarm to small communities to cover newsworthy incidents only for a short time, giving those journalists little or no way to develop rapport within the community. Local media are the exact opposite -- they have established rapport in their communities, and large-scale, newsworthy events can cause serious strains on reporters’ relationships with the community. Then, after the national media pull out, any poor behavior by national journalists remains in the community’s memory, resulting in resentment and hostility that is often transferred to the local journalists.
It’s always a good idea for journalists of all stripes to tread lightly into new territory, but national journalists would do well to be much more concerned about how their actions can affect their peers working in community media.
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What is HTC anyway, and why are we doing it?
- Posted by Bernhard Debatin in Dr. D’s HTC blog on 10/30/2008
- tags: HTC
As you may have noticed on the J-school’s front page (see section Scripps News) our HTC freshwoman Taylor Mirfendereski has produced a fabulous video report for CNN on the Honors Tutorial College (HTC).
It can be viewed here:
The piece gives a good overview of this amazing academic opportunity, but it also shows that not everybody may enjoy the challenge and self-motivated learning style that HTC students are expected to bring to the table.
Part of the HTC experience is a stronger focus on the scholarly side of your education. It culminates in an honor’s thesis, written during the senior year. Another part is the ongoing dialogue among students and among students and professors.
Talking about dialogue -- if you’re in the HTC journalism program, don’t forget that we will have our quarterly HTC Journalism meeting on Nov. 6, from 5:00 to 6:30 P.M. in Baker Center 237.
We’ll have pizza and soft drinks, and talk about thesis plans and related issues. Our current seniors will give you a quick rundown of their thesis projects.
We will also watch/discuss some videos on covering the environment and how to make the invisible visible.
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What’s the difference?
- Posted by Bill Reader in Community Journalism on 10/28/2008
- tags: cj
At first pale, there may seem to be little difference between community journalism and the so-called ’mainstream media’ journalism of big-city newspapers, global magazines, national broadcasting and cable media, and national/international Web sites. But there are many profound differences, and countless subtle differences. Here are but a few:
• First, community journalism is journalism that privileges community values over professional values. That is, community journalists are sensitive (but not necessarily deferential) to the wants and needs of the communities they serve. That affects everything from news judgment (what is or is not worth covering) to making tough ethical decisions (about publishing information that would be embarrassing to people who live in the community).
• Second, community journalism respects, and provides, what is generally called "micronews" -- the minutia of community life. Examples include: bowling-league scores, elementary-school cafeteria menus, activities at senior-citizen centers, Honor Roll listings, and so on. Although not at all glamorous from a journalism standpoint, such information is very useful to members of communities, and community media would be foolish not to be the most trusted source for such information.
• Third, community journalism is generally quite personal. Whereas an MSM reporter might spend a few hours interviewing a person and never talk to that person again, a community journalist is likely to run into the people she or he writes about (particularly in small towns). That can be both intimidating and helpful; intimidating because community journalists have little insulation from sources who are angry about how they are portrayed in news stories, but helpful in that it encourages reporters to be much more sensitive about how they treat sources.
The above traits are common to all community media, from small-town newspapers to Web sites that serve virtual communities spanning the globe.
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What is ’community journalism’?
- Posted by Bill Reader in Community Journalism on 10/28/2008
- tags: cj
There’s a lot of buzz in both the industry and the academy these days about ’community journalism,’ and many pros and profs who are doing the talking think the concept is somehow new.
They’re wrong.
’Community journalism’ as a distinct branch of the journalism industry is at least 50 years old, stemming back to a course (and textbook) of that name taught by Kenneth R. Byerly at UNC-Chapel Hill in the 1950s. But in practice, community journalism goes back much, much farther -- in fact, an argument could be made that community journalism is as old as journalism itself.
Which begs the question, "What is ’community journalism,’ anyway’"?
As several journalism scholars define it, community journalism is journalism that serves distinct communities, typically small towns, suburbs, or urban neighborhoods, but also communities of identity (ethnic communities, or GLBT communities, etc.), of avocation (farmers, dentists, firefighters), or of short-term goals (i.e., special interest groups). Generally, these communities are "small" in some sense, and have certain aspects that set them apart from larger populations. The news media that serve those communities also tend to be small, but more importantly, the journalists who produce those media tend to have fairly strong connections to the communities they serve.
That is very different from, for example, the largest daily newspaper in a major city, or a national television or radio news network. Those media may have more prestige, popularity, and influence in the regional and national arenas, but at the community level, they have very little affect. Even a poorly edited small-town weekly newspaper can have a tremendous impact on community life in a small town than can CNN or USAToday.
When it comes to numbers, "CJ" clearly and unambiguously dominates the industry. In the U.S. alone, for example, about 97 percent of all newspapers are classified as "community" newspapers, or newspapers with circulations below 50,000. Most are not dailies, but weeklies, twice weeklies, etc. All together, those newspapers have a combined circulation of nearly 109 million, about three times as much as the combined circulation of the 220-or-so daily newspapers with circulations above 50,000. That’s why we call community journalism "the bottom of the iceberg" -- it may not be the part of the industry that gets much attention, but it is by far the biggest part of the industry.
That is not to say "CJ" is either better or worse than metropolitan, regional, or national/global journalism. Rather, the "two journalism" have different goals, different obligations, different strengths, and different limitations.
I’ll get into those differences with later posts. For now, understand that the biggest difference between community journalism and so-called "mainstream journalism" is point of view.
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Alumni return to speak to freshmen
- Posted by Robert Stewart in From the Front Office on 10/14/2008
- tags: alumni, freshmen, j101
The freshmen class in the JSchool recently heard four alums speak about their careers. What they heard was simple: You are part of a tradition. Don’t blow it.
OK, their message was a little more nuanced, but in essence Cooper Jones (’00), Stephanie Busack (’05), Dan Farkas (’98) and Chelsea Hamilton (’06) told students in my J101 class that they have a responsibility to work hard, achieve and then give back. That’s the formula for making the JSchool a quality program.
I agree. Our newest students need to understand that they are part of a larger community. How they comport themselves in the classroom, in extra curricular activities, during internships, and on the job will go a long way in preserving the JSchool’s reputation. That reputation, in turn, will go a long way toward increasing the value of a BSJ from Ohio University. And that’s good for all of us.
