Comp. Exams, Pt. 3: Online Journalism

What if you were designing a graduate course on online journalism? Or what if you were taking comprehensive exams and you subject area was an overview of current, empirical research projects investigating online journalism…

What articles / books would you assign?

There’s so much dreck out there when it comes to nattering on about blogs. Here’s a list that I just put together. What do you think? What would be top on your list?

ps- this list will be adjusted based on your suggestions. be warned 🙂

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Background: Technology, the Media, and Journalism

Fischer, Claude S. 1992. “Technology and Modern Life.” In America Calling: A Social
History of the Telephone to 1940.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Williams, Raymond. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.

Beczkowski, P.J. (2004) Organizing the News. Boston: MIT Press

Barnhurst, Kevin G. and John Nerone. (2001) The Form of News: A History. New York: The Guilford Press.

Online Journalism

Kidd, Dorothy (2003). “The Independent Media Center: A New Model,” Media Development. Found online at http://docs.indymedia.org/twiki/pub/Global/PDFsOfIndymediaGuide/brochurepages.pdf

Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. (2004) “We Media: How Audiences Are Shaping the Future of News and Information.” Online at http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php

Domingo, David. (2003) "Ethnography for new media studies: a field report of its
weaknesses and benefits", paper presented at the New Research for New Media Symposium. University of Minnesota, Institute for New Media Studies.

Kennedy School of Government Case Program. (2003) “Big Media Meets the Bloggers: Coverage of Trent Lott’s Remarks at Stom Thurmond’s Birthday Party.” Online at  http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1731_0.pdf

Deuze, M. (2003) “The Web and its Journalisms: Considering the Consequences of
Different Types of Newsmedia Online.” New Media and Society 5(2): 203-230

Lih, Andrew. (2004) “Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics For Evaluating Collaborative Media as a News Resource.” Paper for the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism (April 16-17, 2004) University of Texas at Austin. Online at http://journalism.utexas.edu/onlinejournalism/2004/papers/wikipedia.pdf

Herring, Susan C. et. al. “Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs.” Paper for the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (2004) University of Hawaii. Online at http://csdl.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2004/2056/04/205640101b.pdf

Kumar, R. et. al. (2005) “On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace,” World Wide Web Internet and Information Systems 8(2): 159-178

Shirky, C. (2003) “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality,” from Networks, Economics and Culture. Online at
http://akgul.bilkent.edu.tr/extremedemocracy/Chapter%2520Three-Shirky.pdf

Matheson, D. “Weblogs and the Epistemology of the News: Some Trends in Online Journalism,” New Media and Society 6(1)

Johnson TJ, Kaye BK (2004). “Wag the Blog: How Reliance on Traditional Media and the Internet Influence Credibility Perceptions of Weblogs Among Blog users,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 81(3): 622-642

Hanke, Bob (2005). “For a Political Economy of Indymedia Practice.” Canadian Journal of Communication 30(1)

Van der Wurff, Richard. 2005. “Impacts of the Internet on Newspapers in Europe: Conclusions.” Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 67(1): 107-20.

Deuze, M et. al. (2004) “Journalism Education and Online Journalists in Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands.” Journalism Studies 5(1): 19-29

Klinenberg, Eric. (2005). "Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age."
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597.

Singer, Jane B. (2005) “The Political J-Blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a New Media Form to Fit Old Norms and Practices,” Journalism 6(2): 173-198

Lowrey, W., and Anderson, W. (2005). “The journalist behind the curtain: Participatory functions on the Internet and their impact on perceptions of the work of journalism.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(3), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/lowrey.html

Do Journalists Possess “Expert” Knowledge?

Maybe they used to; or maybe they used to trick everyone into thinking they did:

"We’ve pretended to be like priests turning water to wine, like it’s a
secret process. Those days are gone."
— Craig Crawford, Congressional Quarterly columnist.

Or maybe they never did:

"A journalist is a reporter out of a job."
— Mark Twain

Comps.

This Spring (late May, probably) … comprehensive exams!! My categories and the various readings:

Objectivity in Philosophy, Science, and History

* Obejectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Rorty

* Construction of Social Reality, Searle

* The Social Construction of What?, Hacking

* Truth, Blackburn

* "The Image of Objectivity," Daston (from the Journal Representations, 1992)

* Haskell vs Novick on objectivity in history): Novick, That Noble Dream (selections) and Haskell, Objectivty is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (ch. 6 from the book).

*"Reason, Politics, and the Politics of Truth: How Science Is Both Autonomous and Dependent," from Sociological Theory (2004)

<The second half focuses more on objectivity in journalism. Many of these come courtesy of Michael Schudson …

* Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions, Schudson (this is actually the original version of Discovering the News that I thought would be interesting because it looks at law as well as journalism)

* Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865-1920, RL Kaplan

* The Invention of Journalism Ethics, by Stephen Ward

* Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism, DTZ Minditch

* “In Defense of Objectivity,"  Lichtenberg

Journalistic Authority: A Cultural and Historical Overview

* Summers, Mark Walgren. The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics 1865-1878.

* Tucher, Andie. “Reporting for Duty: The Bohemian Brigade, the Civil War, and the Social Construction of the Reporter.” (Paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting 2004)

* Dickon-Garcia, Hazel.  Journalistic Standards in the 19th Century

* Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News.

* Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory.

* Glessing, Robert J. The Underground Press in America.

* “Introduction to the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The New Journalism: A Panel Discussion,” and “Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine.” From The New Journalism Debate.

* Carey, James. “American Journalism On, Before, and After September 11,” from Journalism After September 11 (Zelizer and Allan, ed.)

* Rosen, Jay. “Bloggers Versus Journalists is Over” (entire debate including links and comments). Online at http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/01/15/berk_pprd.html

Finally, an overview of current, empirical research projects invesitgating online journalism. List TBA.

To aid in studying, I’ll probably be posting summaries of the different readings here as I complete them. Hooray for you!!

“Completed” Papers

Yes, yes, I know you, my non-existant readership, has been waiting breathlessly in anticipation. Well, wait no more: my papers on Particpatory Journalism and Journalistic Professionalism are now online in pdf form.

Anderson, C. 2005 Is There a Public For Particpatory Journalism?: DRAFT

Summary: With the simultaneous emergence of web-based particpatory media and the decline of the "public journalism movement," many  intellectuals have sought do link developments online to their former work in public journalism. This paper examines the degree to which public and particpatory journalistic forms overlap, in a theoretical sense, and concludes with a call for internet-based media to realize its journalistic potential.

Anderson, C. 2005 The Deprofessionalization of Journalism?: DRAFT

Summary: In this essay I seek to outline an integrative theoretical structure within which to analyze changes that may or (may not) be taking place in the “business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general interest and public relevance.” The paper draws on the literature of the sociology of the professions, as well as work by Bourdieu, Foucault, and Weber.