Today AEJMC published instructions for paper submitters. Here's the Uniform Paper Call for the Boston convention for your reading pleasure.
If you plan to direct your submission to CCJIG, here's our call, to be read in conjunction with the instructions. I look forward to all the good research!
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
We are the largest
Vice-chair Mary Beth Callie and I attended AEJMC’s mid-winter meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, this weekend.
While in Louisville I made sure to check out the famed Fourth Street.
And yes, I visited the Ali Center: Muhammad Ali was, after all, my sporting hero during much of high school. (Not that I could box to save my life!)
Ali may well have been "the greatest," but I am no less proud to announce that we, the Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group, are now the largest:
CCJIG has emerged as AEJMC’s largest interest group in 2008-09. We have 116 registered members of whom 57 are female; six identify themselves as African-American, two as Asian-American, and twelve as International. Kimberly Bissell, the Council of Divisions chair, made the announcement Friday evening.
The status reflects our growing ability to decipher the many challenges of practicing journalism in a quickly transforming media firmament.
Shortly I will post the details of CCJIG's program for the 2009 Boston convention.
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
Chair, Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group
While in Louisville I made sure to check out the famed Fourth Street.
And yes, I visited the Ali Center: Muhammad Ali was, after all, my sporting hero during much of high school. (Not that I could box to save my life!)
Ali may well have been "the greatest," but I am no less proud to announce that we, the Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group, are now the largest:
CCJIG has emerged as AEJMC’s largest interest group in 2008-09. We have 116 registered members of whom 57 are female; six identify themselves as African-American, two as Asian-American, and twelve as International. Kimberly Bissell, the Council of Divisions chair, made the announcement Friday evening.
The status reflects our growing ability to decipher the many challenges of practicing journalism in a quickly transforming media firmament.
Shortly I will post the details of CCJIG's program for the 2009 Boston convention.
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
Chair, Civic & Citizen Journalism Interest Group
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Journalism comes full circle with civic/citizen movement
Boston, where AEJMC will convene in 2009, is where it all started 318 years ago.
In Boston, arguably, was America’s earliest journalism practiced. In Boston lived the earliest printer-editors, two Benjamins and two Franklins: Benjamin Harris’ quirky, chatty Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick (1690), of which only one issue was ever published, was a veritable coffeehouse in newsprint. James/Ben Franklin’s wry New-England Courant (1721-23) frequently offered Ben’s pseudonymous byline, “Silence Dogood.”
The early printers were citizens first, community activists second, and editors if at all. They weren't J-school trained in any nuance of reporting, pagination or ethics (why, Ben Franklin published his own letters as if sent by readers).
Their work was not to be measured by Siebert’s theories or Hutchins’ norms.
But in all of American journalism’s history – the Revolution, the penny decades, the Civil War, Pulitzer/Hearst, the muckrakers/Progressives, the age of broadcasting – if successful editors had a common denominator, it was a finger on the readers' pulse.
A function of that finger on the pulse is the reporter’s craving to connect to an audience, to decide the news, to influence public opinion. It's the craving that makes journalism; the rest is literature.
Any surprise there’s a reflection of democracy in journalism?
But does journalism’s quid pro quo with democracy offer a frame to decipher the newspaper industry’s current travails? Perhaps institutionalization shields the journalist from the reader’s pulse? Perhaps pulse journalism can by itself guarantee profits? Or trump sound economics? – even if the one really a subset of the other? If news and advertising are the two sides of a piece of toast which side is buttered? Ah, that last was a joke.
From small-town Lansing State Journal to venerated New York Times, the urban newspaper's holy grail lies in finding a structural cure for falling circulations (ibuprofen won't cure a Migraine).
Can civic/citizen journalism offer that grail?
Look at the expectations. From the Times to CNN, America’s loftiest media organizations are welcoming the obscurest iReporter, the lowliest blogger, for his or her proactive journalism, a phenomenon which J.D. Lasica has classified in some detail. They are clearly trying to touch communities – in a reflection of David Perry’s call to use journalism to enhance social capital, or Buzz Merritt’s cry for a public journalism.
Perry's and Merritt's work, of course, is too famous to elaborate here.
As is Philip Meyer's call for newspapers to focus on a "leadership audience." Or Leonard Witt's pitch for a “representative” journalism, the idea of using not organizational but communal resources to subsidize the cost of journalism. And Jeff Jarvis' now ancient postulate: “Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose.”
Clearly, scholars and journalists alike are feeling a sharp excitement. Inevitably, it seems, America's legacy media must accept that a YouTubization – allowing the collective intelligence of the “former audience” (to use Dan Gillmor's gravid lexicon) to distill the news – is the sexy new way to keep news accurate, cheap and exciting.
Has journalism come full circle from the era of Harris and the Franklins, or what?
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
In Boston, arguably, was America’s earliest journalism practiced. In Boston lived the earliest printer-editors, two Benjamins and two Franklins: Benjamin Harris’ quirky, chatty Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick (1690), of which only one issue was ever published, was a veritable coffeehouse in newsprint. James/Ben Franklin’s wry New-England Courant (1721-23) frequently offered Ben’s pseudonymous byline, “Silence Dogood.”
The early printers were citizens first, community activists second, and editors if at all. They weren't J-school trained in any nuance of reporting, pagination or ethics (why, Ben Franklin published his own letters as if sent by readers).
Their work was not to be measured by Siebert’s theories or Hutchins’ norms.
But in all of American journalism’s history – the Revolution, the penny decades, the Civil War, Pulitzer/Hearst, the muckrakers/Progressives, the age of broadcasting – if successful editors had a common denominator, it was a finger on the readers' pulse.
A function of that finger on the pulse is the reporter’s craving to connect to an audience, to decide the news, to influence public opinion. It's the craving that makes journalism; the rest is literature.
Any surprise there’s a reflection of democracy in journalism?
But does journalism’s quid pro quo with democracy offer a frame to decipher the newspaper industry’s current travails? Perhaps institutionalization shields the journalist from the reader’s pulse? Perhaps pulse journalism can by itself guarantee profits? Or trump sound economics? – even if the one really a subset of the other? If news and advertising are the two sides of a piece of toast which side is buttered? Ah, that last was a joke.
From small-town Lansing State Journal to venerated New York Times, the urban newspaper's holy grail lies in finding a structural cure for falling circulations (ibuprofen won't cure a Migraine).
Can civic/citizen journalism offer that grail?
Look at the expectations. From the Times to CNN, America’s loftiest media organizations are welcoming the obscurest iReporter, the lowliest blogger, for his or her proactive journalism, a phenomenon which J.D. Lasica has classified in some detail. They are clearly trying to touch communities – in a reflection of David Perry’s call to use journalism to enhance social capital, or Buzz Merritt’s cry for a public journalism.
Perry's and Merritt's work, of course, is too famous to elaborate here.
As is Philip Meyer's call for newspapers to focus on a "leadership audience." Or Leonard Witt's pitch for a “representative” journalism, the idea of using not organizational but communal resources to subsidize the cost of journalism. And Jeff Jarvis' now ancient postulate: “Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose.”
Clearly, scholars and journalists alike are feeling a sharp excitement. Inevitably, it seems, America's legacy media must accept that a YouTubization – allowing the collective intelligence of the “former audience” (to use Dan Gillmor's gravid lexicon) to distill the news – is the sexy new way to keep news accurate, cheap and exciting.
Has journalism come full circle from the era of Harris and the Franklins, or what?
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Invitation to join AEJMC panel proposal
Burton St. John of Old Dominion University asked if I would blog the following announcement. Please send any response to Burt by October 7.
"Have you been noticing how mainstream, independent and citizen journalists have been starting to run into more problems with law enforcement? For example, during the St. Paul Republican National Convention, police actively investigated, detained and/or arrested journalists as diverse as an AP photographer, three members of indymedia outlet Democracy Now and citizen journalists from the group Eyewitness Video.
"I am putting together a panel proposal tentatively called 'Law Enforcement and Journalists: Security versus Rights' for next year's AEJMC conference which runs Aug 5-8 in Boston. If you're researching the tensions between law enforcement and the press please feel free to email me (bsaintjo@odu.edu) by October 7. Please provide a short synopsis of your proposed presentation. As a board member of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Group, which would sponsor this panel, I am especially interested in seeing suggested panel items that touch upon what these evolving tensions mean for journalism's assertions of its perceived rights in society today, and what implications the developments may hold for journalism's assertions in the future. -- Dr. Burton St. John III."
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
"Have you been noticing how mainstream, independent and citizen journalists have been starting to run into more problems with law enforcement? For example, during the St. Paul Republican National Convention, police actively investigated, detained and/or arrested journalists as diverse as an AP photographer, three members of indymedia outlet Democracy Now and citizen journalists from the group Eyewitness Video.
"I am putting together a panel proposal tentatively called 'Law Enforcement and Journalists: Security versus Rights' for next year's AEJMC conference which runs Aug 5-8 in Boston. If you're researching the tensions between law enforcement and the press please feel free to email me (bsaintjo@odu.edu) by October 7. Please provide a short synopsis of your proposed presentation. As a board member of the Civic and Citizen Journalism Group, which would sponsor this panel, I am especially interested in seeing suggested panel items that touch upon what these evolving tensions mean for journalism's assertions of its perceived rights in society today, and what implications the developments may hold for journalism's assertions in the future. -- Dr. Burton St. John III."
Nikhil Moro, Ph.D.
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